The Brave One

We deplore violence yet we cheer it. All depends on who holds the gun, or at least that seems to be the message of The Brave One, the tale of a woman who loses her sense of moral certitude when violence disrupts the illusion of the world in which she lived.

Jodie Foster plays New York public radio host Erica Bain. She has a lovely life, delivering her poetic observations about the city over the airwaves and spending time with her handsome doctor husband, David, and their dog.

Then one night, they walk through a tunnel in the park, and thugs brutally beat them both. David dies. Erica ends up in the hospital with purplish bruises on her face.

But the physical wounds don't cover her psychic ones. She is forever changed, her view of the world warped 180 degrees.

She, for the first time in her life, feels unsafe in the city she loves. And to protect herself, she finds a gun. She, as she says in the movie, is now a stranger unto herself, someone unrecognizable. She has forged an entirely new identity.

She has become a vigilante, and when she fires her gun into the thugs she encounters in the days and weeks after her attack, she learns to love the power that surges within her with every bullet that launches forward and into bad people's flesh.

Director Neil Jordan seems to be trying to say something more meaningful than those Death Wish movies of the 1970s with Charles Bronson. That something is set in Foster's steely face and sharp blue eyes, as she portrays a woman determined not to be a victim and take back some measure of the confidence she once had moving through the city.

And into this mix enters Detective Mercer, played by the always-intense Terrence Howard. Foster and Howard bring an energy and chemistry that makes everytime they appear onscreen together electric. Mercer is the moral center of the movie, a troubled man who nonetheless has tried to do the right thing and abide by the law he has sworn to uphold. It's not easy, especially when he sees the bad guys not get punished.

So we have a tension automatically between these two characters, Erica Bain, the woman willing to take the law into her own hands, and Mercer, the law man who reluctantly wants the criminal justice system to work, no matter how frustratingly slow it seems.

Jordan allows space for Foster to play her strenghths as an actress. It is within her small muscular frame that Foster creates a woman both strong and weak, hard and fragile. Erica Bain is confused about her place in the world, and her gun, in a sense, is her anchor.

But it is in the ending where Jordan fails us. This whole confrontation builds throughout the whole movie between Howard and Foster, and Jordan takes the easy way out.

No, I won't give away the ending. What I will say is that it wasn't nearly as satisfying of an ending as I was expecting. And in the end, I had little sense of what exactly the kind of message Jordan was sending. We have no clue as to what kind of person Erica Bain becomes at the end, how this violence she has experienced and has dished out has changed her.

I left the theater neither deploring nor cheering for a film that started out strong but ended as every other vigilante movie did.