The notion of a film wherein the sensibilities of blockbuster producer Joel Silver and dark cinematic poet Neil Jordan could comfortably share screen space is a pretty farfetched one, and yet here's The Brave One, an intense New York-set thriller that manages to be both commercial and contemplative, kick-ass and quietly, disturbingly insinuating. The glue holding all these moviemakers and their modes together is star–executive producer Jodie Foster, in a career-redefining performance recalling and surpassing her work in Taxi Driver and The Accused.
As in Taxi Driver, she plays a victim; as in The Accused she plays someone refusing to accept victimization. The Brave One's Erica Bain is a genuinely refined, genuinely sensitive radio personality whose show is a combination of field recordings and personal observations on New York City. But she finds the city she loved is gone after a brutal park attack that takes the life of her adored fiancé (Andrews) and leaves her barely hanging onto her own.
"Fear never touched me," she observes after her body has healed, "and then it did, and then I realized it had been there all along." Her way of dealing with fear is to illegally procure a gun. She gets the chance to use it, in a random incident in a deli that brings to mind the first time Travis Bickle uses his gun in Taxi Driver; it's a weird sequence, because such real-life scenes aren't nearly as common as they were in 1976, and the movie frequently acknowledges that, yes, it does take place in the "new," "cleaned up" New York. But once we're plunged into Erica's fresh hell, no such special pleading is necessary. Erica steps up her vigilantism while striking up a relationship with kind, emotionally damaged police detective Mercer (Howard); sometimes she seems to be baiting him, other times manipulating him. Sometimes she's asking him to love her, or trying to love him. Their relationship seems as if it could take Erica out of her despair. Instead, she picks at it, as a scab. After dispatching some thugs in the subway, she asks herself, "Why don't my hands shake? Why doesn't somebody stop me?"
The level of psychological insight and empathy brought to the material (the screenplay is by Roderick Taylor and Bruce A. Taylor with Cynthia Mort), as well as the peculiarly Jordanian touches throughout (the director manages to imbue a hospital oxygen saturation monitor with a particular luminosity in one shot) lift this picture well above the likes of an average Charles Bronson potboiler, but — make no mistake — The Brave One can hardly be said to ignore the prerogatives of its genre. The violence Bain wreaks is damn ugly, but it's also exhilarating; indeed, that's part of the movie's point. Eventually Bain becomes so proficient with her gun she can make snarky, pissed-off comments before firing — always good for the trailers. The police procedural stuff is brisk, with deadpan maestro Katt providing more comic relief than such a picture might usually bear, but he makes it work. Up until the somewhat rushed and improbable finale, this is rich, involving stuff, with Foster and Howard doing some remarkably subtle and evocative work as lost souls putting on a masquerade for each other.
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READ MORE: The Brave One Q&A: Jodie Foster
