movie review - the brave one

last night i watched the brave one. now i didn't quite know what to expect from this movie, as i like jodie foster (except for that horrible flightplan movie, seriously woman, what were you thinking?) and i am a sometime fan of neil jordan (he of interview with a vampire and crying game fame), but i really enjoyed it. even though the film takes place in a post 9/11 new york and can be seen as an episode in carthasis, it didn't weigh the film down or exude any of the obvious god bless america nonsense that seems to be all over the place in american cinema these days. plus it has a morally ambiguous centre that by the end still doesn't have any resolution, which personally i think is a very brave move and makes the film seem that much more realistic because of it.

for those that don't know the plot i'll break it down for you. erica bain (foster) and her fiance (naveen andrews, sayid from lost) are attacked and beaten while walking their dog through a park one night. he dies because of the savage (and i do mean savage) beating and she barely survives. skip to three weeks later and she wakes up in hospital a shattered and deeply disturbed woman who doesn't know who she is anymore (figuratively speaking - not amnesia). so much so that her job of hosting a radio program about her love of walking the streets of new york and just taking in the familiarity and how she feels connected to the city she is so in love with takes a darker turn. she doesn't feel safe and everyone on the streets seems like a stranger and potential criminal. even her style goes from upbeat woman with perky hair and girlish charm (something i didn't expect from foster) turns into a simpler and detatched look, with her hair straight and unkempt, her clothes simple and an expression that makes her seem distant and controlled. as one character puts it, she looks scary. now i don't mean that it's all through her clothes and look, but this is only one example of the ways in which this woman is a changed person. she goes so far as to mention on her radio show that she doesn't know her city anymore, she used to laugh at women who didn't feel safe walking the streets at night and now she's one of them. but that all changes when she, fed up with the inability of the police to find her attackers and the general fear she now embodies, buys a gun. this is where the film in lesser hands would degenrate into a revenge film something in the vein of a brian dennehy (i tried to find a vid of him as john wayne gacy but failed, wah!) film or death wish 6 or something, but this is where the film becomes interesting. i will only tell you a small fragment of this part of the film as i don't want to destroy it. she becomes somewhat of an accidental vigilante. while in a corner store she witnesses a murder. a man bursts in and shoots the woman behind the counter, not for money, but because she is divorcing him and she is apparently getting full custody of the children. while bain is hiding, hoping not to be seen by the murderer her phone rings. he obviously hears it and starts looking for her in the old 'don't leave a witness' fashion. he finds her, but before he can shoot her she shoots him. this scene is the start of something much bigger for her - the feeling of hopelessness is gone and she dosn't feel like the victim anymore. and this is what drives this movie, a feeling of empowerment and the lost feeling she has knowing that her fiance's killers are out there, but also the feeling that she is living in the grey area of justice and even though she has killed someone who apparently 'deserved it' she knows that it is not her place to hand out this particular kind of street justice. this is made all the more obvious in a scene where during her radio program she is made to take calls from listeners about the vigilante, who by now has killed a few people. she is at first annoyed, then disgruntled and finally disgusted by what she is hearing coming from people's mouths. as the calls start with a no one should kill people or yay for the vigilante and end up in the surreal area of i love the vigilante, here's my phone number to i am the vigilante you see bain's confusion and repulsion and finally the realisation that she doesn't know what to do or if she can stop.

i found the most interesting parts of this movie were it's themes and how they were handled. for instance bain becomes somewhat of a serial killer. she inhabits alot of the attributes put upon real serial killers. she has an MO, befriends a cop and returns to the scene of the crime. i don't know if this was intentional, but it does lend itself to the moral ambiguity this film seems to wallow in and is a great juxtaposition bewteen street wise vigilante working outside the law and public menace that's killing citizens in cold blood. i also quite enjoyed that race was never seen to be an issue in this film. almost every character was from somewhere else. bain/foster is obviously from south USA, her fiance arabic brought up in england, their friends a new yorker and an irishman, the cop she befriends is african-american, her neighbour is jamaican or haitian, she buys the gun of an asian guy, her attackers are hispanic... the list is endless, and not once does this become an issue or spoken about. the only time difference is mentioned is when the cop (terrence howard) tells his ex-wife that women don't shoot themselves in the head, but in the heart/chest, and even this is more to do with a plot point rather than sexism or validating difference, as no one suspects bain is the killer because she is a petite woman not a muscle bound type A male, thus allowing her to kill more and slowly descend into her own kind of hell.

as you can probably tell i really enjoyed this movie, i could prattle on about it for ever. about the use of a tunnel as her symbolic threshold into her own dark and sinister (anit-)hero's journey, about her dog being a symbol of innocence and even about the fact that foster was robbed an oscar nomination for this role purely because i'm assuming people just saw it as a revenge flick and not as a character study of a woman pushed to extremes through fear and disempowerment. (stupid motherfucking juno gets a nom but jodie doesn't? are you serious? i can see boring shite like no country for old men being there, but juno? do they let monkeys vote for these things? next you'll be telling me page got a nom for actress for playing an unrealistic smart-mouthed tryhard-punk kid? oh wait... DAMNIT!!!) but anyway i can totally recommend the brave one to everyone. i though it was brilliant and if you've been reading my blog you know that i haven't seen anything that comes close to brilliance in awhile. alot that doesn't deserve mentioning (i am legend, no country for old men, the golden compass), but nothing that exceeds excellence quite like ths movie does. see it now and let me know what you think, i would love to hear from others what their take is.

(ps someone really needs to fix the spellcheck on this thing, i am way too lazy to care that much about spelling on a blog.)