The Brave One

Jodie Foster is fucking fantastic as the alternately menaced and menacing survivor of a random attack in Central Park. The film, unfortunately, is very weak. I hate it when that happens.

For a film that wants to say something about moral relativism, there isn’t a lot of room for shades of grey. Before the attack, Erica’s life is picture perfect: perfect job, perfect fiance (for the first time, I got to hear Lost’s Naveen Andrews with his real [British] accent, and as a high point in the film let me just say this only makes him hunkier). No one talks like the people in this stage of Erica’s life do. Everyone talks the way people do when they first meet, awkwardly and excessively politely.

After the attack, New York is nothing but a terror zone, and not only in Erica’s understandably damaged perception. Everywhere she goes, she happens to run into a crime in progress. Equally conveniently, Terrence Howard’s cop is the first to arrive on every scene after she exacts revenge. At this stage, everyone talks in ’40s noir quips. Not in a canny throwback kind of way, but a really forced and flat kind of way.

There are seeds of an interesting story in this: gender politics (OMG, could the vigilante be a woman?!) and, again, the issue of moral relativity, justice, law &c. That ground has been trodden before, but interesting things can still be said. Yet at every turn, this film opts for the simple plot twist (my audience called them out as if stunned at their own brilliance: “she’s going to kill him herself!”) and catchphrase in place of thought. By the time Erica’s dog — separated from her during the attack — comes back on the scene, my credulity was strained far beyond its limits. Close the film with a Sarah McLachlan ballad and I’m just done.

So I say the film is lucky as hell Jodie Foster is in almost every frame (and in the few she is not, the always good Howard is). She very nearly makes the whole thing work with a deeply felt but never overwrought performance. I hope the film’s quality doesn’t negatively impact her chances, awards-wise. Hers is going to go down as one of the finest of the year.

The other story here is the fucking audience I watched this thing with, over half of whom whooped and cheered every time she fired her gun. I realize the moviegoing public has been set up to root for a protagonist, but even if this film had succeeded in saying something interesting about moral relativism it would have been lost on its viewers. Michael Haneke is bringing Funny Games to America and they won’t get that, either. They’ll be thrilled at having seen another horror film. “It sucks that they didn’t show more violence,” they’ll walk out saying, “but it was pretty scary, yeahhh!” They won’t get it. When those people cheered today my stomach lurched. But we’re warmongers, we’re spectators of violent sports, we’re armed and no one can take our guns away from us! and I knew this already… Oh, and just to show we have our priorities straight, IMDb posters are consulting each other before screening this to find out what “level of sexuality” it may contain.