The Brave One

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Brave One a new take on Michael Winner’s Death Wish from so long ago – must be 30 years ago. This new one stars Jodie Foster as the vigilante, directed by Neil Jordan (though he doesn’t have any script or story credits) and was produced in part by Joel Silver.

The story: Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) has a radio show in which she does personal stories about New York city. She is happy and on top of the world. Her show is popular and they want to make a TV version. Her boss loves her. She has a fiancé who’s a doctor and they are so so so haaaaaaapy together that you know it will soon take a bad turn. Her friend even tells her, ‘you are too happy.’

Yep – they are attacked in the park, and brutally beaten. Fiancé ends up dead, Erica is in hospital 3 weeks recovering. She tries to get her life back together but is too upset. In constant fear – for her job entails walking all over the city – she tries to get a pistol, but the 30-day permit period seems too long for her so she buys an illegal gun.

Then one day in a convenience store she sees a murder. The killer knows she is in the store. To protect herself she kills him and runs away. Some days later, on the subway, she is threatened by some punks. She shoots both of them.

Now meanwhile we follow the parallel story of a police detective (Terence Howard) who ends up in charge of the investigation into the ‘vigilante killings’ as they come to be known. Erica kills again, but she also starts interviewing the detective. He used to listen to her show, so he talks to her when he won’t talk to the other media. They become friends.

She goes so far as to kill a wife-killer the detective tells her he wishes he could bring to justice. But this brings the detective to suspect her. He as much as tells her that he won’t let their friendship stand in the way of arresting her if he has enough evidence. But she is so distraught about the whole thing – she already tried to give herself up – that she doesn’t flinch.

Now just at the point when she swears she won’t do it any more (an artificial second curtain ‘bright moment’ insufficiently motivated to believe in) she gets a lead on the three guys who killed her fiancé and beat her up. She goes to kill them after they mail her video to her cell phone of the attack (one had a video camera while they were beating her). She forwards the video to the detective and goes to meet them. The detective is frantically trying to get there before anything can happen.

She finds the punks and kills one. She kills the second. But the third one gets the drop on her and is killing her with an iron bar when the detective comes in. She points her gun at the punk, detective points his gun at her. Standoff. Then she hands over her gun.

Then the detective hands her his own gun. Tells her to go ahead and shoot. She kills the third punk. Detective has it all figured out: it was these three punks who had the gun all along, they were just on a killing spree, there was no ‘vigilante’ after all. He makes her shoot him in the forearm with her gun (the ‘vigilante’ gun) so that he can report that the punk got in a fight with his partners and killed them all, and when the detective came the punk shot him, and the detective had to fire back in self-defense.

Erica walks away. She even gets her dog back (the punks took it after they beat her up – now this is impossible, say some guys attacked you and beat you up in front of Jack, would Jack be their pet for the next couple of months? Doubt it!). But her voiceover tells us there is no going back, she isn’t the woman she was before, she is that stranger – the killer.

There are a few visual riffs on Death Wish. But here are a couple problems: Bronson who starred in Death Wish was already an action star, had been in a leone western. The gun he gets is a colt 6-shooter. So Death Wish becomes a wrinkle on Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry: the ghost of the old Western justice come to visit the modern metropolis. We don’t really believe Charles Bronson as an architect, but when he gets that gun, we do – it’s as if Bronson is now becoming himself.

Contrast this to Jodie Foster who does not have that persona. The closest her film roles come to this is Taxi Driver and the real-life ugly incidents that followed it. it’s odd that she would be in this movie. And it twists my head to think of those three images – her now here, her in Taxi Driver, and her as an image in the assassination attempt. Of course she gives us her usual well-thought out, researched, skillful performance.

But what we have are three contrasting points of view wrestling for mastery in the picture: jodie wants to do a riveting psychological portrayal. Joel Silver and the Warners brass want a female Death Wish series. And Neil Jordan wants, it seems, to show that he can deliver a visually interesting picture as director, that he’s not just a writer.

So Jordan gives us beautiful visuals, and does all these fancy tricks with the camera that are completely inappropriate to the subject matter. This is a story that you either shoot flat, very matter-of-factly, gritty, realistically, naturalistically – or else you make it into a surreal nightmare (which Warners and Silver are NOT going to accept).

And Foster cries and tries to act beyond what the material will allow. I say ‘beyond it’ because if this woman is really so distraught, I can’t see her succeeding in what she does. She might be repressing everything in order to survive, and her control might come out of that, but then you doubly don’t want to shoot it in this hyper-real way that Jordan and Philippe Rousselot, the DP, use. You want to desaturate colors and aim at near black and white, you want to keep the camera eye-level, at a medium shot most of the time, an invisible camera style, and you want to emphasize control as she does. The camera has to be as repressive as she is, or else where is all the emotion in the camera moves coming from? From the woman who she is not letting out?

The finale is pure Joel Silver wish-fantasy garbage. I just can’t believe the detective doing what he did. For one thing, this detective is smart. He would know that if he lets erica go, she will kill again and go on killing until she gets herself killed. To protect others, to protect her, the detective can do her no better favor than to arrest her and see she is locked away.

But then, you see, you don’t get sequels!

(24 April 2009)