By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
[Toronto] The Brave One (*** 1/2, 2007)
NEIL JORDAN’S BEST WORK AS A WRITER AND DIRECTOR IS CUSTOMARILY WHEN HE DRAWS FROM FAIRYTALE FORM, ranging from In The Company Of Wolves to The Miracle, Mona Lisa and The Crying Game, allusions to Alice in Wonderland are recurrent, as in the fate that meets New York public radio host Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) when she and her boyfriend (Naveen Andrews) walk their dog in Central Park late one night. It runs into an underpass at Stranger’s Gate at the far north of the park at 106th Street, and it’s down the rabbit hole for Erica. (Call it “This American Strife.”) After the brutal mugging and weeks in a coma, Erica tries to return to her everyday life, which no longer exists—especially after she buys a gun illegally and soon un-lucks onto a liquor store robbery with queasy echoes of a similar scene in Taxi Driver, a fever dream of Manhattan paranoia and feelings of helplessness that Foster had no small role in. While Death Wish is a movie that The Brave One will be paired with by some reviewers, as Foster’s steely version of Terry Gross is taken as a Charles Bronson vigilante—NPR meets NRA—there are other fevered Manhattan-set movies that it evokes, such as Abel Ferrara’s city-of-death Bad Lieutenant and female revenge Ms. 45 as well as the lurid, moist In the Cut by Jane Campion. Jordan and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot impressively create a fearful post-9/11 milieu, and the liberties taken with topography and plot logic are often quite beautiful to observe: the fears in the world at large are reduced to the potential for harm on modern city streets. Yet the folie-a-deux between Erica Bain and the cop on her tail (perhaps too literally so), Mercer (Terrence Howard), which also arrives at absurdity, the simplicity, directness and brisk, assured pacing—despite expressionist explosions of sudden violence—make this conflicted amorality tale into more than hothouse lyricism or the latest in Foster’s lineage of victims who correct wrongs (The Accused, Flightplan, Panic Room) Make no mistake: still, this small, fierce woman’s brute cheekbones are an axiom of modern American cinema. Like David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, The Brave One is fearless even at its most foolish. Nicky Katt is a standout as Mercer’s droll sidekick. [Ray Pride.]
