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(beware: some of the following may be a plot-spoiler) If you reckoned with what you perceive your greatest fear to be, what would it be? That all you value and all you’ve invested to protect what you value could be stripped away because someone wanted to take it? Would you find yourself mourning the loss of a simple and utopian, Andy Griffith-like world, where you could leave your door open and your lawful protectors could hang their weapons, unlocked and unguarded in a trust-laden Mayberry? That your life is just one threat assessment/management episode after another? That your nurtured pockets of safety are illusions? The Brave One is not solely or even primarily the bad-girl vigilante picture of the year. The movie establishes itself most strongly on our current culture of fear, exploring themes of disempowerment, loss, mistrust and the fragmentation of the self when responding out of those dark, emotional corners- especially when those choices take you to places of sacrifice for which you are totally unprepared. Erica Bain, (Jodie Foster) sits in a protected radio booth, a self-professed “streetwalker”- sort of an every-person’s commentator on the waning ethos of the New York City she loves. She suspects, through her radio show, that something stirs in the darkness, calculating a personal and visceral challenge to “the safest big city in the world.” The backdrop to this is her relationship to her boyfriend-soon-to-be-fiance, David (Naveen Andrews) and it happens rather fast and furious. We are plunked right in the middle of their giddy romance and it seems like we’re watching teenagers who can’t get their hands off each other. It kind of felt like their romance was a brand new one, but they were already talking wedding invitations, so either they just met in a whirlwind dervish or this is the brave movie saying, “looky how really, REALLY in love they are.” This is so that when something happens, you’re gonna feel it. It needed a little more subtlety is all. On one particular evening out, Erica and David are strolling in the park with his German Shepherd dog in tow. Their attention is to each other when the dog chases down an errant throw of a ball into dark tunnel and is lost. You know when Erica and David enter there, much more will be lost as well. Needless to say, a brutal beating occurs by some thugs, killing her fiance and leaving her pummeled and in a coma for three weeks. I won’t reveal the dog’s fate here, but the hound plays perhaps a key role here and throughout the movie in answering the most existentially vexing question Erica may pose in the film. In the chaos of them being brought to the emergency room, shots of the physical examinations on their bodies are juxtaposed to clips of their lovemaking in an attempt to extrude the harshest of ironies. Perhaps a clever cinematic ruse, but it was a bit overkill when the trick was attempted again, albeit for a lesser span. She awakens to the news of David’s death while her loss is tempered by an apathetic police investigation. Any good revenge film needs that final push away from the law and it happens here in stages. She continues her convalescence from the confines of her home where her fear- not some criminal punk’s fist- beats and berates her. For her loss, she is given this fear and dead-end walks down her dark hallways to peer at her outside world where she views, imprisoned and behind glass. When she does venture out, her fear holds hands with the greatest mistrust as she hunkers from and jumps at the most normal of human street activity. This clearly is a world not the same anymore. But has the world changed, or is she only seeing it as it has really been all along? Bain is clearly a woman burdened with the open wounds of what to do with this fear, one strengthened by her conclusion that even the police are powerless putty in its hands. She finds herself taking the matter to a gun shop, where she inquires about purchasing a gun. She is rebuffed by the 30-day wait period and the licensing process until someone sells her a handgun illegally. No matter what the system does, it is minimized to strength of a cream-puff, unable to protect proactively or provide after-the-fact. With the cold steel in her hand, there is a power lurking and a transformation underway. In her apartment complex resides the film’s “Switzerland…” an (African?) national who’s seen her share of pointless violence and loss in her homeland. She is somewhat of a moral compass for Bain’s spiral downward- sometimes neutral, sometimes outspoken. Consider her observation to Bain, who’s taken up smoking:
Figuring out how to live is in the fine tension between the things we can control and the things we can’t. It’s just that Erica Bain is bound by consequences to choices that depend upon previous ones. It is our choice that defines what we are as they each build into what we are becoming. Fear of loss/mistrust causes her to react preemptively and violently. She is not blind to the import of what she is doing so much as she is numbed into the reality of never being able to turn back. The sacrifice is about to become too great. She also couldn’t control the fact that the homicide detective (played skillfully by Terrence Howard) happened to like her show and haphazardly peeked in on her while she was in a coma. Detective Mercer was at the hospital at the time to garner information that would have helped him nab his arch nemesis, a drug-dealing, wife-killing, illegal-arms importing bad guy named Murrow. This would serve to later link both Erica and Mercer together in a way that could solidify their identities as it revolved around their dilemmas. The question is how much of a choice either would have. While Erica is in a convenience store, a man looking like Jack Nicholson with a squished head busts in and pumps bullets into his estranged wife who fatally slumps behind the counter. Erica is discovered and the killer stalks her around the shelves, intending the same for her. She has a choice in a situation she did not choose….kill or be killed. This is what the gun offers. She chooses the former and thus begins the radical transformation. She finds herself seeking out encounters with bad people who are intending ill on others and this is where she finds empowerment again. She wears black jackets and gloves, wanders the streets, and records the sounds of the city, hearing it not so much in a different way now, but having a context in which it makes sense. Through her chosen vigilantism, she quells the random and chaotic violence that threatens us all. Or so she thinks. Attending her fortitude is not just the giving up of her pills and cigarettes but the reclamation of her radio program, where she eventually contacts and interviews the Detective Mercer as he investigates the murders, hot on her heels. She is visibly intoxicated by the sensitivity of Mercer, who sympathetically identifies with her loss, although his is a loss on a different scale. His loss is ever-potential, in that he admits the only way he could take down Murrow is beyond the power afforded him legally. He toys mentally and emotionally with what Bain lives in and for. They forge an eerie connection and through the progression of their relationship, one wonders just what they really know about each other. Is he an ally or a foe? As she makes her case to Carol (Mary Steenburgen), her arms-crossed-and-bottom-line station manager, Bain’s frustrated vitality takes a small peek: “I just need to keep living- I don’t wanna disappear!” She wants to be stopped but can’t, asking “why doesn’t somebody stop me?” She wants to be the person she once was, but she cannot, and poses this question on the radio show of which she is now the subject as the whole city is talking about the vigilante:
She finally and fully enters her part, fueling the rage from the fear and making every “bullet hit home” though each successive act is increasingly more risky. She wonders if she is finding the baddies or are they finding her (again, her loss of objectivity in the string of her choices). And the relational tension arrives at a semi-romantic complexity between her and the detective. It isn’t really a contrivance and it is only hinted at and may be a result of the mutual admiration they have for one another, knowing that as they grow toward each other, they can never have what they perceive each other to have (she has unilateral power of justice and he has the hope of a new “tomorrow”). Foster truly shines from within the turmoil Erica Bain both needs and reviles. She doesn’t assail us with easy psychological solutions to her predicament. There are several instances wherein one wonders just how it will end for her. But the strength of Brave One is that Erica Bain is a shell for which all of her life has ended…at least the life she had built. She is in mourning- for David’s death and the life she once knew. She willingly offered what little she had left and never could have counted the cost beforehand. Therein, she is the most pitiable and wandering of lost souls, but one we could all somewhat identify with. All this was offered rather impeccably by Foster’s interpretation of Bain’s angst in a performance that has an outside chance of another Oscar nomination for her. But there were troubles nonetheless. You may find the resolution to the movie either not a resolution per se, or a distracted solution offered up as a convenience by the writers, especially where Detective Mercer is concerned. If the question “just WHO is the final arbiter of justice” is central here (and I think it is), a tandem question would be “how is redemption possible or realized?” Maybe it winds up there, maybe it doesn’t, but redemption is an issue and I don’t know if there was a position on that at all. Terrence Howard finely stabilizes the murderous waywardness of Erica Bain and hands over a noteworthy performance. However, his partner detective is the film’s sole source of comic relief. His aloof, ditsy and deadpan delivery works more than it doesn’t, but that may be because in the density of the dark subject matter that is the whole film, just about anything would wax humorous. I was interested in the audience reaction to the unfolding events in the film. Many were clearly taking glee in the Erica Bain’s vigilante justice, often erupting in vocal praise and clapping in light of the violent and deadly outcomes. It might be said that Brave One is not a protracted polemic for/against gun control (though some conclusions either way can be wrought) nor is it one for/against violence (although it did take a quick potshot at the Iraq debacle). It is however an upending commentary on how the choices we make are contingent upon one another and can exact a personal toll beyond that which we are prepared to repay. This is why to me the reaction was perplexing: the film exhumes our own latent suspicions and fears and allows us to displace them upon Erica Bain as a heroic icon who can shoulder all the times we’ve been cheated, robbed and taken advantage of. It is easy to see how some audience members can leave the theater thinking that, but I don’t think this is director Neil Jordan’s intention. That would be too cheap a thrill, to satisfy the belly of such base instincts. The film clearly reveals them nonetheless. We are left to the peril or the possibilities of our responses to the greater calamities of real life when they do come.
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