The Brave One

On a hot summer night in Manhattan two women are attacked, separately, and end up in the same Intensive Care unit. One lives, barely, though her fiance died at the hands of three Hispanic gangbangers and the other dies, purportedly a suicide. An NYPD detective, assigned the suicide, checks in on the woman who survived; he’s a fan of her NPR-ish radio show. The pair of cops from his squad assigned to her case get nowhere on the vicious assault even though the perps videotaped themselves.

Erica Bain (Jodi Foster) is barely able to get past the fear that keeps her trapped inside her apartment and when she does its to get a handgun. Her radio show mainly consisted of her talking over random sounds she recorded on walks all over the city but now she shrinks at the sound of footsteps on busy streets in broad daylight. The fiance’s family couldn’t (didn’t?) wait for her to be released from the hospital so she makes a trip to his grave, crying until she falls asleep at his feet.

When she wakes up the Sun’s long gone and the subway car she rides home is nearly empty. A soft white teenager is lost in his iPod and two young black guys use the threat of a beating to take it from him. At the next stop he and a father and daughter race off but Erica remains, seemingly lost in her own world. “Locked down,” the former iPod owner later describes her. The two guys can’t believe she stayed and as the train pulls out of the station they move on her. Erica simply pulls the pistol out of her purse and shoots them both dead.

This time NYPD Detective Mercer (Terrance Howard) is the primary in what’s quickly becoming known as another Bernie Goetz vigilante. Two more times the vigilante strikes and, since the cops and everyone else assumes the self-appointed crime fighter is male, no one even considers Erica as a suspect. Mercer and Bain have even met in her media persona role and, from his perspective, are maybe falling for each other.

Then, just after a post-midnight, unable to sleep phone call, the husband of the alleged suicide from the opening is murdered. Since Murrow’s a sleaze, involved in drugs, sex slaves and more, and Mercer fears for the guy’s six year old stepdaughter who might just know a bit too much about her mother’s death, he isn’t too upset at catching the case. Almost certainly Murrow was offed by someone in the business, a competitor or a cheated partner. Then he hears the elevator bell in the parking garage where the murder happened and remembers hearing the same sound towards the end of his call with Bain.

While I usually don’t give so much of the plot here it doesn’t matter. Police procedurals, cat and mouse, mistaken assumptions, all standard fare. Not bad but not that relevant to why you want to see The Brave One. Which you absolutely do because Foster and Howard turn in two amazing performances that ought to get serious consideration come awards season.

The script by Bruce Taylor, Roderick Taylor and Cynthia Mort (I couldn’t figure out if the Taylors are brothers, though they seem to generally work together) is interesting, though obviously reminiscent of Death Wish, Taxi Driver and the much more recent Death Sentence. The complex dance between Foster and Howard’s characters and, for the most part, the consistency of their actions throughout put this movie closer to Scorsese’s classic than the other two.

Perhaps this ought not to be that surprising given that Brave One is directed by Neil Jordan, the Irishman whose made such excellent films as (in chronological, not quality, order) Mona Lisa, The Crying Game (won the original screenplay Oscar, nominated for directing but lost to Eastwood’s Unforgiven), The End of the Affair and The Good Thief. Roger Ebert’s review points to Jordan’s frequent focus on gender subversion in his movies which is perhaps at least partially explained by what he said about his schooling in Ireland: “[Y]ou have an educational system run by celibate men in skirts, which is bizarre in itself.”

Travis Bickle, Paul Kersey and Nick Hume–all men. And as mentioned no one is looking for a female vigilante in this situation either. Erica is able to move freely through the days, to show up at Mercer’s press conference, at a precinct house and even start taking calls on air about the person taking justice into ‘his’ own hands without really attracting any suspicion, because ‘these people’ are always men.

But we get a nice bit of foreshadowing that I bet most viewers miss (I did) when Howard tries to explain to other police why Murrow’s wife wasn’t a suicide. Women, he points out, never shoot themselves in the face because they’re too conscious of what comes afterward. Subtle, but on point.

You will probably read or hear some complaints about the ending, speculation about studio meddling. I agree that denoument is weaker than it could, and should, have been. But after consideration my opinion is that it’s inconsequential because what’s dazzling here are Foster, Howard and Jordan, their ability to bring out powerful, damaging emotions without taking them too far and turning The Brave One into a campy, unintentional farce. No, this is a keeper.

definitely recommended