THE BRAVE ONE
The Brave One (2007), dir Neil Jordan, starring Jodie Foster
This film seems to be a reprise of the film that propelled Robert de Niro to stardom, Taxi Driver, with Jodie Foster still a victim but this time combining that role with the Travis Bickle part from the original film, vigilante and killer. Both age and some of the ironies (that come with getting older) seem to be catching up with Jodie Foster, who has never been a stranger to lurid exploitation. Just think of the damage the part of Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs did for the cause of the mentally ill? (and deranged people in general)
The film overtly condones vigilantism as a legitimate response to threats and oversees a wholesale breakdown in the law system of a New York which Foster’s character Erica Blair, a Radio DJ, still calls the safest city in the world. But NYC seems to be a very violent place, a place where a white woman isn’t safe to go out at night even with the company of a vicious dog (but not a vicious husband). He is soon tatey bread (Belfast rhyming slang meaning ‘dead’ derived from potato bread) and Jodie Foster goes through a ‘self-healing process’ which is probably corny, shameful but doesn’t involve a trip to re-hab. Instead she (quite by accident) embarks on a killing spree, beginning with her killing of a violent psycho-killer, who has mown down his Vietnamese wife in a dime store. Fair enough. Predictably, Foster is then being tormented by some black, would- be rapists on the underground when she puts 2 or 3 silver bullets into them. The police now realize that they are in pursuit of a vigilante.
A vigilante, a person who takes the law into their own hands, is a strangely pre-social phenomenon to us. Such a person inhabits a moral grey area, encompassing legitimate morality, yet also somehow pre-modern (and pre-social), a throwback to an era of revenge justice that seems to be finished. Obviously recent American history has re-evoked some of the ghosts of the Wild West era that SEEMED to be dead and gone. Foster recalls the Travis Bickle character but there is none of the hilarious, ridiculous in appropriateness of his character in her, the elements that made ‘Taxi Driver’ such an instantaneous hit. In fact Foster and the film aren’t very funny at all.
Predictably the film ends by endorsing and condoning Foster’s vigilante killer, allowing the police (a very PC black policeman) to be participants in her crimes. The plaintive soundtrack ending underscores the horribleness of the entire project. But I think many people will applaud this effort.
Paul Murphy, Ealing Empire, London
This film seems to be a reprise of the film that propelled Robert de Niro to stardom, Taxi Driver, with Jodie Foster still a victim but this time combining that role with the Travis Bickle part from the original film, vigilante and killer. Both age and some of the ironies (that come with getting older) seem to be catching up with Jodie Foster, who has never been a stranger to lurid exploitation. Just think of the damage the part of Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs did for the cause of the mentally ill? (and deranged people in general)
The film overtly condones vigilantism as a legitimate response to threats and oversees a wholesale breakdown in the law system of a New York which Foster’s character Erica Blair, a Radio DJ, still calls the safest city in the world. But NYC seems to be a very violent place, a place where a white woman isn’t safe to go out at night even with the company of a vicious dog (but not a vicious husband). He is soon tatey bread (Belfast rhyming slang meaning ‘dead’ derived from potato bread) and Jodie Foster goes through a ‘self-healing process’ which is probably corny, shameful but doesn’t involve a trip to re-hab. Instead she (quite by accident) embarks on a killing spree, beginning with her killing of a violent psycho-killer, who has mown down his Vietnamese wife in a dime store. Fair enough. Predictably, Foster is then being tormented by some black, would- be rapists on the underground when she puts 2 or 3 silver bullets into them. The police now realize that they are in pursuit of a vigilante.
A vigilante, a person who takes the law into their own hands, is a strangely pre-social phenomenon to us. Such a person inhabits a moral grey area, encompassing legitimate morality, yet also somehow pre-modern (and pre-social), a throwback to an era of revenge justice that seems to be finished. Obviously recent American history has re-evoked some of the ghosts of the Wild West era that SEEMED to be dead and gone. Foster recalls the Travis Bickle character but there is none of the hilarious, ridiculous in appropriateness of his character in her, the elements that made ‘Taxi Driver’ such an instantaneous hit. In fact Foster and the film aren’t very funny at all.
Predictably the film ends by endorsing and condoning Foster’s vigilante killer, allowing the police (a very PC black policeman) to be participants in her crimes. The plaintive soundtrack ending underscores the horribleness of the entire project. But I think many people will applaud this effort.
Paul Murphy, Ealing Empire, London
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