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‘The Brave One’

Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard are superb in showing how two people who have a hole in their lives turn to each other to fill it.

By Bob Brown
   This is one strange love story, even though it’s supposed to be about vigilante justice. Earlier, we’ve remarked how vigilante films are the new norm for law and order in an era when the world seems out of control. Justice itself seems to have gone missing.
   We saw how Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon) becomes indistinguishable from the ruthless killers who snuff out his son in Death Sentence. He goes after them methodically, even coldly. It kills him psychologically, and he pays a heavy price for his transformation. The end befits an Elizabethan tragedy.
   In The Brave One, on the other hand, the vigilante’s transformation is more disturbing because she grows in strength, conviction and justification with each hit. She’s not worn down, she’s empowered, one might argue even sexually charged.
   In Roderick and Bruce Taylor’s screenplay, directed by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is a radio commentator who ruminates on the state of her city, New York, as she walks its streets, recorder in hand. It’s a rather self-conscious trope — being the Big Apple’s one-woman Greek chorus — but apparently the Bain character was originally a New York Times print reporter. That didn’t work too well with the spoken voice-overs.
   Everything is going smoothly for Bain, who is about to marry David (Naveen Andrews of TV’s Lost). They make one fatal mistake, however, walking their dog after dark in Central Park near “Strangers Square.” (Bain must not be paying much attention to the lore of her own city.)
   The next thing Bain knows, they are jumped by a gang of hoodlums who snatch the dog and beat David to death. Bain wakes up in the hospital. Recovery is slow, but she finds at the other end she has become a different person, a woman with new fears and a grudge.
   Just as for Hume, a grudge requires a gun. Bain scores an automatic pistol on the black market within minutes of failing to buy one legally. All that’s left are opportunities to use it. Like the proverbial Texan who said, “Every time I go without my gun, I see somethin’ that needs shootin,” Bain’s weapon of self-defense soon becomes, with her, a one-track enforcer.
   Crimes and punks materialize where Bain had never noticed them before. And they need shooting right quick. Her dark radio monologues become darker as she ruminates now on realizing that the person who inhabits her body is a stranger, the once-loved city no longer benign. Of course, she doesn’t say what she’s done about it, but listener response is frightening. There are strong opinions on the street, and Bain’s producer, Carol (Mary Steenburgen), opens the board to call-ins. The response is scary.
   The complications arise when one of her ardent listeners, Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard), sees her near the scene of a shooting, her second. He remembers her from the time she was hospitalized after her own attack. They strike up a professional friendship, each interviewing the other, and it evolves into an intriguing cat-and-mouse game with surprising results.
   Foster has been heavily hitting the talk-show circuit to promote this film, about which she seems genuinely enthusiastic and proud. Certainly, she should be for all the reasons she says: it raises the issue of where one draws the line in seeking vengeance. Are we not all capable of going over the edge? It’s disturbing to think that we want to cheer for someone who is ridding the world of scum. Hang the slow-moving justice system. There’s no question justice is being done, but without due process.
   Foster also focuses on the common assumption that Mercer’s colleague Detective Vitale (Nicky Katt) voices about women — they kill their husbands, their lovers, their friends, but not strangers. Bain is a woman who fights back against the whole system.
   Foster and Howard are superb in showing how two people who have a hole in their lives (Detective Mercer is newly divorced) turn to each other to fill it. Sometimes the most sensual love stories don’t need a word, or even a clinch, to charge the air. It’s that way with these two, on opposite sides of the law, but in the same place when it comes to human nature and compassion.
   Bain transforms from talk-show observer to ice-cold participant in the violence she abhors. The script and Foster’s performance persuade us to follow her over that line and to sympathize with her actions, even though we would never do such things ourselves. That’s what we keep telling ourselves.
Rated R for strong violence, language and some sexuality.