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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 8, No. 39 |
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 JODIE FOSTER ...seeking vengeance |
Sweet Jodie turns vigilante
in tense new screen thriller
of TheColumnists.com
There seemed to be a lot of reasons to be wary of "The Brave One," the new film from Neil Jordan ("Mona Lisa," "The Crying Game") which stars Jodie Foster asa street crime victim who turns vigilante.
One was the prospect of seeing Foster, one of the most intelligent and thoughtful of all our movie stars, taking up the well-worn trail of Charles Bronson in all those "Death Wish" movies that kept him occupied for 20 years.
Another was the message another vigilante movie might send to moviegoers today, especially if the level of violence were jacked up to ridiculous heights like it seems almost everything is in the films of the 21st century.
Not to worry. Foster chooses her projects and her directors well. "The Brave One" is a sober film about an intelligent woman who begins to discover dark things within her own character that she never had even a hint of before becoming a crime victim. As exciting as it is, "The Brave One" never goes to Bronson-land. It expresses the frustrations of so many of us today about the inefficiency of our criminal justice system, yet doesn't send out a rallying cry for us to start taking up arms to dispense our own justice.
Foster, who's now in her mid-40s, plays radio talk show commentator Erica Bain, a woman who roams the streets of New York, looking for poignant examples of how New Yorkers live their daily lives today. She's not a strident voice, but rather a quiet, comforting voice, more philosopher than rabble-rouser.
One night Erica and her husband go walking with their dog. While walking through the park, their dog runs ahead of them, enters a tunnel and doesn't come back. When they stroll into the tunnel, calling for him, they find he's being held by three toughs who insist they're going to keep the dog. The hoodlums' real intent, though, seems to be to assault Erica's husband, who's a dark-skinned East Indian. In a brutal, hard-to-watch sequence Erica is badly beaten up and her husband is killed.
After a long period of recovery in a hospital, Erica is unable to identify the hoods and begins to realize nothing probably is going to be done to find the men who killed her husband, took her dog and destroyed her normal life. The only sympathetic ear she gets at the police department is that of an African-American detective (Terrence Howard), who's a fan of her radio show.
The film does an exceptional job of showing how traumatized Erica is by her ordeal She's literally terrified to walk into even a dark hallway in her own building. Fearing another assault, she buys a black market handgun and begins carrying it to provide a sense of some kind of security. Almost immediately she's confronted by three hoods on a subway train who threaten her with a knife. Out comes the gun--and her new life as a person who fights back is underway.
Foster, a two-time Oscar-winner, is an extraordinary actress. She conveys the fevered range of emotions Erica starts going through as she watches herself evolve from a frightened crime victim into an angry dispenser of justice, now almost anxious to find some hood to take out her anger upon.
Howard, an Oscar nominee for "Hustle and Flow" two years ago, is a perfect counterpoint to her persona. He's a calm, reasoning man, always seemingly in control of his emotions. He has seen what the vicious attack has done to this bright and articulate young woman, though he doesn't initially suspect just how far she has gone to put her life back into what she thinks is the proper balance.
Eventually, Erica stumbles onto the information that leads her to the actual murderers of her husband. Rather than alert the friendly detective and the police force, she goes after them herself.
All the way, "The Brave One" is an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but it also has a very solid thematic structure that lifts it way above the run-of-the-mill vengeance movie. It also has a twist ending that most moviegoers probably will find very satisfying,
Though at times the film seems to promote taking justice into our own hands, it quite clearly underscores the fact that Erica is doing what she's doing because she's no longer like one of us. How she'll eventually turn out is anybody's guess. In the meantime, you may find yourself rooting for her to blow away the awful people she runs into on the streets of New York, even if you know what she's doing is wrong, wrong, wrong.
©2007 by Ron Miller. The photo is courtesy of Warner Bros. This column first posted Sept. 13, 2007.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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