Saturday, October 6, 2007
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5:28 PM
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Erica Bain, the gunslinging heroine of “The Brave One,” is the host of a public radio talk show called “Street Walk” that takes a sentimental, nostalgic view of New York City. Also a rather purple one, since Erica is prone to come up with poeticisms on the order of “New buildings sprout like chromosomes from the city’s DNA,” a sentence that someone evidently thought so highly of that we get to hear it twice.
Until a senseless act of violence wrecks her affection, Erica looks back longingly at a vanished metropolis whose touchstones include Eloise at the Plaza and Sid Vicious at the Hotel Chelsea. She sighs about how that old Manhattan — Edgar Allan Poe and Andy Warhol are other names in her necrology — is “dying.”
For its part, “The Brave One,” though set in the present, tries to conjure a more specific moment in the history of New York, a time when its citizens, on screen and off, seemed to be in far greater danger of actually dying at one another’s hands. Around 30 years ago, in the depths of its civic and fiscal crises, the city served as a perfect setting for nasty, dark-hearted crime dramas — tales of vengeance that ranged from “Death Wish,” on the brutal, populist end of the spectrum, to the more self-aware and nuanced “Taxi Driver.”
In that movie Jodie Foster played Iris, the young prostitute who was the object of Travis Bickle’s white-knight fantasies. In this one Ms. Foster’s character, Erica, is, like Travis, a haunted survivor who supplies rueful voice-over narration. But her spirit is in many ways closer to that of Charles Bronson’s workaday vigilante in the “Death Wish” movies. The public radio gig, the references to Emily Dickinson and D. H. Lawrence, the directing credit for Neil Jordan (of “Crying Game” fame) — all of this produces a patina of refinement and seriousness.
But don’t be fooled. “The Brave One,” though well cast and smoothly directed, is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be.
And that, the movie insists, is how, in your heart of hearts, you really do want it to be. Its none-too-subtle governing idea is that even the most effete, brownstone-dwelling public radio listener (or New York Times reader) might feel the occasional urge to blow someone’s head off.
Mr. Jordan and the screenwriters, the father-and-son team Roderick Taylor and Bruce A. Taylor, and Cynthia Mort, clearly relish the conceit of transforming a slightly built, overcivilized blonde into a killing machine. After allowing us a glimpse of the carefree life Erica shares with her fiancé, David (Naveen Andrews) — scenes that remind you just how little the portrayal of happiness has figured in Ms. Foster’s recent performances — they plunge her into a modern urban horror story.
While walking their dog at dusk in Central Park, with joggers and park-bench sitters in sight, Erica and David are viciously beaten and robbed by three thugs, who also steal the dog. As if to emphasize the swift, brutal transition from before to after, Mr. Jordan tastelessly juxtaposes images of Erica’s bloody clothes being stripped off in the emergency room with flashbacks of David slowly undressing her for lovemaking. After three weeks in a coma, Erica awakens to find that David has died and that she is paralyzed by fear and grief.
The cure is an illegally purchased 9-millimeter pistol and a box of bullets (when told of the mandatory 30-day waiting period for a legal purchase at a downtown gun store, she replies, “I need something now,” perhaps unwittingly echoing one of Homer Simpson’s greatest lines.) At first accidentally and then deliberately, Erica becomes a vigilante, shooting down a murderous husband who is also a convenience-store robber, a pair of iPod thieves who are also potential rapists and a few other bad guys whose badness is similarly overdetermined.
Erica clearly feels some anguish, but little in the way of remorse. Ms. Foster handles her emotions efficiently, having made pain offset by steeliness something of a specialty of late. In “Panic Room” and “Flight Plan” her mix of desperation and ferocity was that of a mother in extremis. Here, looking smaller and more vulnerable but at the same time more ruthless, she is driven by grief, perhaps a less rational and more dangerous motivation.
Not that “The Brave One” is overly concerned with the finer points of her psychological state. Nor does it have much new or interesting to say about the morality of her actions or the urban context she inhabits. Erica’s foil and confidant is a homicide detective named Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard), who seems to be the only member of the New York Police Department actually interested in doing his job. (His partner, played by Nick Katt, is the only person in the movie with a sense of humor).
Mercer befriends Erica and agrees to be interviewed for her radio show, even as he is investigating the shootings carried out by the mysterious, presumably male, vigilante.
They have a few desultory discussions about the rule of law and the ethics of extrajudicial killing, arguments that are resolved in a climax that manages to be at once preposterous, sentimental and appalling. That it may also be viscerally satisfying is a sign of just how cowardly “The Brave One” really is. It’s a pro-lynching movie that even liberals can love.
“The Brave One” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has intense violence, profanity and some nudity.
THE BRAVE ONE
Opens today nationwide.
Directed by Neil Jordan; written by Roderick Taylor, Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort, based on a story by the Taylors; director of photography, Philippe Rousselot; edited by Tony Lawson; music by Dario Marianelli; production designer, Kristi Zea; produced by Joel Silver and Susan Downey; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 122 minutes.
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