The Brave One

By Linda Winsh-Bolard

Radio personality Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is getting ready to be married to her sweetheart David Kimani (Naveen Andrews) and to live happily the upper middle class life in New York City.

New York is what she is passionate about, it is what her talk show is about, it is called Street Talk and at the opening of the film Erica narrates her impressions of passing city, passing time in the city and the unending changes it brings. She does not know it yet but she will live them through.

In the evening she and David take the dog out for a walk and by ordinary mischance end up being attacked by two thugs. David is beaten to death; Erica ends up in the hospital.

Coming out she faces her own fear of living, of the attackers coming back and, surprise, the fact that she is alone. Being wounded in the city is a sign of weakness, her boss is unsure of her being able to work, her fiance's family leaves her. The police are "investigating" but are getting nowhere fast, and certainly show no interest in the survivor.

The total lack of concern for her, and for all the other unnamed people,is what makes her buy a gun. Illegally, New York City has one of the toughest gun laws and mere fact of being savagely attacked does not give anyone the right to protect themselves with a firearm.

Yet that is precisely what Erica needs to do to survive every day's life. She gets an overpriced gun, learns roughly how to shoot it and carries it around.

She is buying soft drinks in a small shop when a man walks in, shoots the owner and attempts to rob the store. Erica hides behind the shelves but her ringing cell gives her away. Before the man succeeds in killing her, she shoots him. And takes away the surveillance tape as she leaves.

Erica is shocked by what is happening to her, how the attack, David's death and the indifference of the authorities are changing her. Before she even understands the changes, thugs threaten her with a knife. As she walks away from her second shooting, she wonders why her hands are not shaking.

The film is more about what unpunished, indifferently overlooked violence might do to the victims than about crime and punishment meted by a "vigilante". Erica is trying to save herself, not to become God. When the detective investigating the killings, Sean Mercer (Howard Terrence), branded "vigilante's" by the media says to her : You have come back, many don't manage, he acknowledges our society's indifference to others.

Erica,on air, closes the circle by talking about the fear we all live with and how we push this fear back by pretending that it will never touch us, that all the injustice and oppression and violence are destroying only some weaker , distance part of humanity. We do this until such time, when we are personally proven wrong. Having no choice, we all might become killers.

It is a philosophical film, shot often in night, changing focus literally in picture as often as the focus of Erica's life is being changed. There is descent into dark , unknown depths, in picture and in Erica's mind. Pools of light and lonely streets full of people. Yet, it is mostly about decent people who are losing their small and large battles to an omnipotent, overgrown, lazy and indifferent bureaucratic apparatus that follows their lives on cameras and surveillance tapes, taps their phones but really does not care what happens to them.

It becomes all Hollywood dreamy when the powers that might do not crush Erica, in real life they would have. She has killed, indeed she killed more then once, that makes her dangerous because she refused to be victimized. And where would the system be if people refused to be victims?

All starry cast and crew: director Neil Jordan and cameraman Philippe Roussellot both have an Oscar, Jodie Foster has two, Terrence Howard has been nominated and Mary Steenburgen, Erica's radio boss, also has one. Acting here is pleasure to watch. For once nobody is bored, nor lives of a reputation, and the scenes between suspicious Howard and defensive Foster are truly fine.

Screenplay: Roderick Taylor, Bruce A. Taylor, Cynthia Mort, story, Roderick Taylor, Bruce A. Taylor.