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Jodie Foster doing Death Wish. That’s all you need to know.
If only that was the case, for your collective sakes
Foster, being Foster, of course, has to have the flick be all important and pretentious around her. It can’t just be a film about a woman pushed too far who decides to take out the trash with handgun and crowbar at hand. It has to be about how a person can lose their soul, even when they feel like they’re doing the right thing in trying to claw their way back to the person they used to be.
Jeez, doesn’t Foster ever lighten up?
Look, as a fan of hers and many of the movies she’s been in, I have to say the simple fact that Foster would choose to be in any film is usually enough of an incentive to get me to watch it. Unless you’re talking Nell, a flick I’m never going to mention again, and you’ll never bring up again, if you know what’s good for you. I mean it, I’ll go all Jodie Foster on your arse.
But the thing is, had some other actress been cast in the role, the flick probably wouldn’t have gotten as many critical plaudits or notice, and would probably have slipped into direct-to-DVD oblivion unlamented and unmissed.
Which would have been a shame, because director Neil Jordan and the other main actor Terrence Howard do good work making this a solid film, in concert with one of the most respected and admired actors of her day.
Her reputation precedes her, but I guess if you like her work, then it’s a given that she's so wonderful. If you find her overrated or actively dislike her, then you’re not going to give a good goddamn either way.
I think she gives 100 per cent even in mediocre films, but her presence alone tends to elevate material that would otherwise be disposable (Panic Room, Flightplan, Inside Man), and she makes good films great (Silence of the Lambs, Taxi Driver, Contact). She's just so goddamn earnest. And conjurs a great deal of credibility in the characters that she portrays, which is always a bonus.
In The Brave One she plays Erica Bain, a radio presenter who presents an otherwise banal show about the sounds of New York City. She lives a comfortably middle-class existence, is looking forward to her upcoming marriage to her beloved David (Naveen Andrews), and wanders around her beloved city without a care in the world.
That is, of course, until she and her partner are attacked by some violent thugs who leave her partner dead, and Erica in a coma for three weeks.
Ah, victims of random acts of senseless violence. Pick up the pieces, slowly heal, deal with the fear, the feelings of helplessness, the constant reliving of the nightmare. Ah, pleasant memories…
There’s nothing new about that, nor her initial agoraphobia whenever she tries to leave her apartment, her smoking and use of prescription drugs. But something has changed in her, and the reminiscences both of her attack and of her loving bliss with her beaten-to-death partner, put her in mind that it was her view of New York that was naïve and idyllic, and that the city was always a brutish charnel house beneath the surface of her notice.
The cops never get close to finding the attackers, and Erica doesn’t feel safe anymore, so, being an American, she decides that all her problems can be solved by upholding the Second Amendment. That would be the one about the right to bear arms, not the one about lynching all the coloured folk.
That’s further down in the fine print of the Constitution, you have to really look for it.
In this film, unlike in reality, the regulations for buying a handgun prove too onerous for Erica (thankyou Mayor Giuliani), and she has to resort to the black market in order to feel like a real man. I mean, in order to feel safe. Protected. Powerful. Omnipotent.
Whenever I’ve held a gun, I wonder whether the feeling it gives me is similar to what God feels. Whenever He holds a gun.
Reclaim the Night with high-powered firearms, sisters. That’s the shit right there. Though she’d never found herself in these situations before, now every time she ventures out, she finds herself in lethal situations. A domestically murderous situation in a corner store presents her with a difficult dilemma: kill or be killed, and she does so. From such an act arises the thought: why not do a little more?
Why not deal out the justice that the law cannot always provide. The man she killed was just out of prison, and just murdered his estranged wife, and was going to murder Erica as well. Surely this was justifiable homicide (even if the firearm she used was illegal): righteous, lawful, holy.
What bugs her the most is how easy it is. Her hands don’t shake. Even if her initial shots ring out without all making their mark, she now finds she is good at something apart from recording traffic sounds and background noise on her minidisk recorder and muttering quaintly empty platitudes about the metropolis she is terrorising and terrified by.
She is good at what she does, to the extent she is branded a vigilante killer, with an increasing track record of successful hits. Of course no-one suspects a woman to be behind these killings, at least at first. Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard) sees Erica in the hospital after her near fatal assault, and knows her from her radio show. Their paths interweave, not only out of mutual respect and admiration, but because he ends up investigating the murders Erica is responsible for.
To say that Erica represents Justice outside of the Law, and Mercer represents the Law, handcuffed by bureaucracy and lawyer’s trickery, without Justice, would be a simplistic dynamic. It probably wouldn’t be too inaccurate either. At the very least, what distances this from the traditional revenge flick, and by traditional we mean the ones that get white middle-class audiences to side with the white, middle-class vigilantes because they agree along with the protagonist that the legal system doesn’t work anymore and all those blacks, Hispanics and leprechauns are getting too uppity, is that Erica doesn’t revel in what she’s doing.
The problem with Death Wish is that Charles Bronson’s character starts to love murdering people and sees himself as being totally justified, despite being little more than a glorified serial killer.
The Brave One presents situations (mainly) where Erica is justified in defending herself, but not in the killings themselves. In one case it’s clearly self-defence, in another she arguably puts herself in a position on a train where she can kill two African-American thugs who are just begging for it for the sake of it, in another a guy tries to run Erica and a poor, tortured working girl (Zoë Kravitz) down and needs to be put down like the dog that he is. Very bad man that he is.
Except Erica puts herself in these situations deliberately. And later, when she decides to take out a guy who exists as something of a fly in the Detective’s ointment, we have absolutely no reason to believe she is doing good work here. We have no evidence, and Erica has no evidence that the guy is anything more than just a run-of-the-mill arsehole. What justification does she have, do we give her, for this?
The truth is, there are many ways to look at the character, but the one way that makes the most sense for me is that she’s gone mad. Foster plays the role with subtlety, and without overacting (except in one embarrassing scene at a police precinct where it looks like she’s just about to confess), but she’s pretty much psychotic. It’s just not a showy, melodramatic level of psychosis. Either the grief of her loss or the extent of her trauma has rendered her incapable of differentiating between right and wrong.
I don’t think she’s righteous, and neither does she, deep down, even if it does seem like she’s really getting into it. Her interplay with the detective shows that she is not beyond the moral musings and doubts that are usually lacking from other standard revenge fare.
See, this one’s not meant to be exploitative or transgressive in the obvious sense. When a character in something like Sin City, The Hills Have Eyes or Hostel exacts bloody, violent revenge, it hardly matters in any real moral sense. The villains are cartoonish, and, besides, the whole point is seeing the bloody revenge, not moral quandaries and ethical sensibilities around the whole notion of vengeance. Any thrill received in that context is about as important and notable as getting an erection whilst watching a porno.
But when the flick stars Jodie Foster, we know it’s meant to be more serious. When she wonders how much of her soul she’s losing, or whether she’s becoming too much of a stranger even to herself through these killings, we’re meant to understand that This Is Serious. We shouldn’t be delighting in her killings any more so than she should. I don’t think we’re supposed to condemn her either.
Which is… morally ambiguous at best, and moral relativism at worst. I’m not sure, but I guess that’s why this is more of a think piece than your standard revenge fare.
That being said, despite the great job the film does of making Erica a believable character, and truly fleshing out her character, no-one else in this flick gets the same luxury. Excluding maybe the detective, everyone else is a shadow, a caricature or a cartoon. Director Neil Jordan tries to take us into the dark heart that is Erica’s, whilst wanting to show the ugliness at the heart of the metropolis underneath the veneer of normality. And he succeeds.
In the detective we get a representation of someone who tries valiantly to uphold the law despite the many temptations to do ‘evil’ for a noble purpose. He relates to Erica the moral test that he created for himself from the beginning of his career as a policeman. The test involves asking himself whether he could and would arrest someone close to him if he knew they’d committed a crime.
He says he would, he always would. And that becomes via extension the foundation for his career and our perception of him as an honourable cop who, no matter how tempted, would never look the other way.
This is why the ending of the flick, which I won’t spoil, doesn’t work for me, at all. It works on a gut level, on an emotional level or on a wish-fulfilment level, but completely undercuts the themes and ideas going through the flick. Nice to see, but terrible to think about.
The kind of thinking I’m referring to is best represented when Erica’s producer on her radio show suggests that they have a talkback segment. The disgust Erica herself feels when she hears the vaunted people of New York call in is clear and she is horrified by it. It’s a strong and important scene.
It’s hard to miss the parallels to Taxi Driver (a flick she had a prominent role in as a teenager), The Accused and her most celebrated role as Agent Clarice Starling. Strong parallels. I’d have to think they were deliberate, in that there are a few visual cues and clues as well. It’s interesting to contrast the scene towards the end of Lambs where Clarice, terrified, hyperventilating, with gun held slack in trembling hands, seeks a killer in his darkened lair. At the end of The Brave One, again she stalks killers in a darkened lair. But her hands aren’t shaking, and she's not breathing heavy.
In another scene towards the end, as Erica tries to find her way out of a maze of alleys, we realise the director is giving a literal, visual symbol for Erica trying to find her way out of a moral labyrinth, perhaps an symbol so goddamn obvious that it could have safely been left out. And the potential return of her dog, lost to her since the attack, perhaps represents the possibility of Erica regaining her soul after having lost it through violence.
But are we genuinely relieved at the end, or does the unease, the disquiet increase? Does she deserve redemption, death or punishment? Our admiration or contempt?
The truth is, I don’t know. Let’s just leave it at this: Neil Jordan, Foster and Terrence Howard do great, great work here, but overall I don’t think it’s as weighty and “important” as what they think it is, especially because of the ending. But, as always, I review, you decide.
6 levels upon which a murderous Jodie Foster is scarier than Chuck Bronson out of 10
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“Now who's the bitch?” – The Brave One
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