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Death Wish in skirts

A return to the age of revengers' tragedies
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 24th, 2007 issue

 

COURTESY PHOTO
Have gun, will unravel. Jodie Foster crosses the border between hurt and hunt.
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The Brave One

Directed by Neil Jordan
With Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, Mary Steenburgen and Jane Adams

Americans are obviously feeling cornered again. The last time the country was mired in a futile war and enjoyed an economic decline, Hollywood tapped the national vein of impotent rage by rushing a number of vigilante epics to the screen. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry sagas and the violent, white-backlash Joe led directly to Charles Bronson’s Death Wish series, with the whole sub-genre finally reaching its apotheosis with Taxi Driver.
“Everybody knows things are bad,” Howard Beale raves in Network. “You’ve got to get mad!” And mad in many ’70s films was manifested with a gun, registered or not, and a plan to bring frontier justice to the urban jungle. “Smile when you say that” gave way to “Are you talkin’ to me?”
Regardless of the quality of the films, they were all impersonations of a society’s moral impoverishment, a collective abnegation of civilization’s responsibilities for the easier thrill of revenge fantasy. And now, interestingly, they’re back.
In Taxi Driver, the unstable Travis Bickle attempts to save a young prostitute, Iris Steensma. It was a breakout role for the popular child actor Jodie Foster who, up until Scorsese’s film, had been a staple of one season-only television series and ABC Afterschool Specials. The film not only established Foster as a serious actor, it also led to her becoming a deranged would-be presidential assassin’s obsession.
Foster’s career has had its highs, though unfortunately she seems to be in a notable lull at present. Other than her excellent work in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s  A Very Long Engagement and Spike Lee’s underrated Inside Man, Foster has primarily become thriller fodder — first in 2002’s Panic Room (almost prescient in providing the right note of paranoia for post-9-11) and the equally worthless Flightplan from 2005.
These flimsy vehicles for a careening career are now complemented with The Brave One, a morally corrupt flick pushing the catch-penny populism of vigilantism.
The old saw that a “conservative is a liberal that has been mugged by reality” comes to life here —  literally.
Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is an NPR-like radio personality who broadcasts little valentines to Manhattan. She wanders the city’s exciting streets collecting stories, or steps mic-side to riff on Eloise’s life at the Plaza Hotel. She’s engaged to the perfect man, David (Naveen Andrews), and all is right with the world — until they take a wrong turn in Central Park.
In a horrifying attack by what appears to be the Puerto Rican grandchildren of West Side Story’s Sharks, David is left dead and Erica comatose. Once she pulls herself back into the land of the living, she finds that New York has suddenly become an ominous place. Vengeance begins to take a tentacular hold on her mind, and she starts paying more lethal attention to the city around her (she will even, Bickle-like, try to save a young prostitute).
And so New York will again become the stage for a revenger’s tragedy, as Erica sinks further into her own merciless fable of seeking rough justice. Yet director Neil Jordan, perhaps finally missing the Troubles from those halcyon days of the IRA, seems content to let Erica’s murderous round of even-steven run its lawless course. Indeed, he seems to celebrate it.
The revengers sub-genre produced its own sub sub-genre with a score of score-settling women’s pictures, starting with the laughable Lipstick from 1976 and such poverty-row fare as Ms. 45. The Brave One may be tricked out in quotes from Emily Dickinson and D.H. Lawrence, yet is more cheap and questionable than many of the low-budget grudgefests that came before it.
The primary problem is that the central protagonists in these films are usually suffering from an inflamed self-pity, and in this Foster’s performance does not disappoint. Jordan tries to disguise his song to free-range killing with a strawman good cop (Terrence Howard) whose principal task is to engage Erica in glum, moralizing colloquies at deli counters, though this very paragon of virtue will, at the end, make a stand for illegal justice.
There’s nothing brave about The Brave One, just as there’s nothing brave about revenge. This is a simplistic film for a simplistic age.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (24/10/2007):

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