It's a mean old world, and vigilante justice is once again — you should excuse the expression — all the rage. At least in the movies.
From Sin City to Death Sentence and beyond, ordinary citizens are rushing to take up arms on the big screen. And while a cursory glance at these retribution fantasies reveals them as typically testosterone-fueled affairs, the whole revenge genre has often assumed an extra edge when the anger being vented is female.
Watching Charles Bronson hunt down the scum of the earth in Death Wish is one thing, but when the female rape victims in grindhouse classics like Ms. 45 or I Spit on Your Grave exact their terrible vengeance on males of the species, the psychosexual hoodoo can quickly spin out of control, uneasily straddling the personal, the political and the purely sensationalistic. Feel free to choose your own blurb for these brutal and often ugly exercises, but mine might read, "Castration is only the beginning."
All in all, it's a pretty gnarly genre, but now we have The Brave One by Neil Jordan, a gifted filmmaker determined to do something different with material springing from sources both familiar and dangerously sensitive.
Jordan is a classy director, so he lets us know right from the start that The Brave One is a classy film, filling the frame with subtly artistic touches and an all-pervasive moodiness. Classy, Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster stars as Erica Bain, a smart and sensitive New Yorker who's on top of the world as The Brave One opens but quickly finds the sky crashing down when she and her fiancé are viciously assaulted while strolling in Central Park — a crime modernized and made even nastier by being presented to us through the camcorder of muggers recording their atrocities for posterity.
Erica is beaten nearly to death, her fiancé is killed, and when she's finally released from the hospital, the world seems a very different place. Paralyzed by fear and overwhelming paranoia, Erica cowers in her bedroom, afraid of every shadow and sudden sound, leaving her apartment only to deal with the ineffectual bureaucrats at the NYPD, who clearly lack the will or expertise to bring her assailants to justice.
So what's a girl to do but proceed directly to the nearest gun store?
And we hardly need Chekhov to remind us that when a loaded gun is introduced in Act 1, it will most certainly be used.
As it happens, Erica's gun is put into play sooner rather than later. A hood robbing a convenience store tastes lead almost immediately — an act of self-defense on Erica's part, but one that leaves her rushing home to wash away her sins in the shower. The second killing is easier ("Why don't my hands shake?" she asks herself), and by hit No. 3, Erica's practically encouraging assorted members of the city's criminal element to make her day.
At this point, no doubt much to the horror of Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani, the thugs seem to be practically crawling out of the woodwork to terrorize Foster, a terrible flowering of bad seeds that seems more in line with the New York City of Bronson's era than the spic 'n' span theme park the city's become in recent years.
But The Brave One has a point to make and so the creeps keep coming. By her fourth kill, Erica's actively stalking targets who pose no direct threat to her (although she's certain they will in time, since they're so thoroughly evil), and we hear her referring to herself ever more often as a stranger — someone who stands at a distance from herself, barely recognizing the person she's become.
Jordan actively roots around in the escalating alienation and desensitization, listening in on Erica's tortured thoughts at regular intervals and seizing upon the "stranger" motif at every opportunity. There's more than a whiff of Taxi Driver in the claustrophobic compositions and atmosphere here, as Erica makes her nocturnal journey through the urban underworld, the filmmaker repeatedly training his camera on the Central Park entrance known as Stranger's Gate, not uncoincidentally the scene of the original crime.
Right up until its final moments, The Brave One is a curious contradiction in terms — a payback flick that practically goes out of its way to avoid exploitation. The movie's men and women in the street mostly root for the unknown vigilante, who becomes a sort of local celebrity in the course of things. But the vigilante herself is never less than conflicted about her own actions, and the individual murders are depicted as messy, unpleasant events not remotely designed to get an audience on their feet cheering.
The single, notable exception is the movie's final murder, a controversial scene that some may see as Jordan's 11th-hour appeal, whether ironic or not, to the crypto-fascist lurking inside us all. (Right-wing cop-out or not, however, the cathartic bloodletting of that finale is guaranteed to up the film's box office by at least a couple of million dollars during opening weekend alone.)
For most of the movie's running time, though, Jordan places us at a distinct remove from the visceral thrill typically supplied by on-screen violence, choosing to comment on our collective impulse for revenge ("It feels good," is one bystander's succinct explanation) rather than revel in the rush of it all. It's a subtle shift of perspective but a significant one, grounding the film in the paradox that people being afraid of other people is the worst fear of all — the same premise upon which terrorism feeds and probably the very reason that vigilante movies are bigger than ever in the post-9/11 marketplace.
Jordan keeps things churning along, rock-steady but relentlessly downbeat, letting the movie live in its details and in its tightly controlled performances from Foster and co-star Terrence Howard (who does wonders with the slightly bogus role of a detective who befriends Erica without realizing she's the assassin everyone's searching for). While it doesn't quite turn the genre completely on its head, The Brave One gives it its best shot, often feeling less like a revenge movie than a peculiarly edgy chick flick in which a middle-aged woman deals with grief via a 12-step program that just happens to include transforming into a Lady Terminator.
Foster and Jordan, for their parts, make it easy to believe there's a new kind of action hero in town. Maybe even the last one we'll ever need.
This article appears in Sep 12-18, 2007.