Death Becomes Her

Neil Jordan's The Brave One is Death Wish for the NPR crowd.

by Drew Lazor

Death Wish for the NPR crowd, Neil Jordan's The Brave One doesn't raise any questions about vigilantism or social comeuppance that haven't already been asked by dramas dealing with the checks and balances of legality and morality. And, just like its predecessors, it also neatly avoids answering them.

Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is a warm-voiced radio personality and the consummate New Yorker — she almost literally puts a stethoscope to the pavement for a living. Her "Street Walk" segment deals in the Gotham soundscape, as she swings a microphone through the boroughs, soaking in the rattle of an elevated railway or the machismo of a handball court. Her voiceovers are wise but not jaded, as if she's still excited by leaving her apartment every day.

Unfortunate, then, that the very sidewalks she reveres vomit up the gang that brutally attacks her and fiancé David (Naveen Andrews) in Central Park. He dies while she's on life support; when she wakes, she's lost weight (a physical transformation played up well by Foster), as well as the well-worn trust she'd long possessed for the city. Since she can't even go into her stairwell without getting spooked, Erica purchases a black-market pistol and starts walking with her head down, as 45-degree camera tilts hamhandedly convey that nothing will be ever the same.

This is where Jordan, who's historically proficient at crafting empathy for atypical heroes (The Crying Game, Breakfast on Pluto) takes a hard right: Though her purpose is touted as a quest for vengeance, Erica is ushered into vigilantism not by a desire to get even, but by pure bad luck. (She takes her first life in self-defense after being cornered by a killer in a convenience store.) The unapologetically violent notches she carves on her belt — some come to her, others she's looking for — send the city into an ethical frenzy, as people choose sides in the "do-gooder or public danger?" debate. But in large part, Erica's purpose deviates from the hunt for David's killers; she holds a grudge, but the varied nature of her actions makes it difficult to pin down.

Terrence Howard's functional role as Mercer, a mopey divorced cop who admires Erica as much as he suspects her, can't help but come off auxiliary, despite the actor's skill at maximizing the impact of benign dialogue. There's only one telling scene where the leads seem to be on the same page, as an interviewing Erica needles the detective with almost flirtatious questions about the concept of justice. In that moment, she's public record and he's public servant. But the rest of the film trips over itself by insisting that they're both something more.

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)