'Brave' but bitter

Jodie Foster knocks off Big Apple bad guys in an overreaching vengeance fantasy

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

September 14, 2007

(C) Jodie Foster, who earned an Oscar nomination 32 years ago for playing a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, plays a more cultured character in The Brave One, an illegitimate heir to that incendiary mid-1970s masterpiece. Here she's a radio personality who reports poetically on the changing face of New York until her own face is beaten to a pulp.

Then the whole thing turns into trash with flash.

When she goes back on the air, she delivers a monologue about the infection of urban fear and her struggle to overcome it. It rouses such fervid reactions that, for her next broadcast slot, her boss asks her to take calls about a vigilante who has been knocking off the city's killers, thieves and rapists (and will graduate to pimps and mobsters).

The twist is, she's the vigilante.

There have been bloody female revenge fables before, most notoriously Abel Ferrara's 1981 Ms. 45. A lot of action movies are about the bespectacled nerd flexing his biceps and his trigger finger - the worm turning. But with Foster trembling in all her diminutive blond beauty, The Brave One is a rare case of the glowworm turning.

That spectacle is the one semi-novelty in this maddeningly simple yet pretentious payback fantasy.

On the air, the heroine quotes D.H. Lawrence at his boldest from Studies in Classic American Literature: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer." In her never-ending voice-over she quotes the more delicate Emily Dickinson: "Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me."

The movie wants to be about how our radio poet disastrously fuses these disparate sensibilities.

All most audiences will take from The Brave One is the need for any city dweller to develop a hard shell.

At the beginning, director Neil Jordan and his crew strive to make you feel her post-traumatic vulnerability in your gut. The camera zeroes in on her taut, fearful face when, physically recovered, she first ventures out of her apartment. An adolescent male eyewitness at one of her crime scenes describes Foster's character as a scared, skinny - albeit well-endowed - woman.

Once she takes the law - and a 9 mm automatic - into her own hands, audiences cheer as this willowy gal kills with confidence. They root for her even when she goes looking for trouble.

The Brave One is a feminist exploitation film posing as a character study.

Foster has said that the movie's point of view is, "She's getting sicker." That's not how it translates to filmgoers, especially when the picture saves her best and most personal revenge for last and embroils a straight-arrow supporting character in her quest for rough justice. Jordan and his invaluable cinematographer, Philippe Rousselot (Henry and June, Big Fish), shoot her close encounters with crime intimately, as if trying to tap depth psychology. All they deliver is a violent-revenge version of the mingling of flesh and power you see in soft-core trash.

Near the start, the gifted, sophisticated Jordan (The Crying Game, The End of the Affair) intercuts the emergency-room doctors tearing the heroine's clothes away with flashbacks to her doctor-fiance (Lost's Naveen Andrews) tenderly stripping her and making love to her. Jordan wants us to feel the tragic ironies of her predicament. But that juxtaposition foreshadows the vile blend of up-close pain and cathartic relief that permeates the rest of the movie.

The heroine keeps telling us she's becoming a new person and a stranger to herself. But all we see is a battered woman crippled with apprehension until vengeance turns her physically courageous and brazenly self-confident. The script is so poorly developed that she seems not a new person but two people: one still able to function, however precariously, as a voice of conscience on her radio show, and the other committed to blowing away bad guys.

The flimsy suspense rests on the script throwing her together with a righteous NYPD detective (Terrence Howard) who mourns his divorce as sharply as Foster does her fiance's murder. His ex-wife was a fan of her show, and as the detective goes after killers and thugs in his own scrupulous way while bonding with Foster over loss, Howard displays his full range of dynamic sensitivity. But even Howard can't pull off cliched action turns such as a cop handing a gun to a cohort and saying, "Wing me." (Saturnine Nicky Katt steals scenes as his wisecracking partner-sidekick.) This film may be a crossover hit of sorts. Upscale audiences who wouldn't be caught dead at a Death Wish flick but adore Foster and Howard can get their cheap thrills and think they're seeing something classy and brand new. Silence of the Lambs fans can savor the sight of Foster transforming into a sort of serial killer herself.

As the ever-discerning Hannibal might say, this movie is so fundamentally insane, it would go down a whole lot better with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

>>>The Brave One (Warner Bros.) Starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard. Directed by Neil Jordan. Rated R. Time 122 minutes.