Blogical Conclusion

JODIE’S GOT A GUN…

… but she’s also got herself a disappointing vigilante drama. Plus, a royal tale where another good actress is buried in a not-so-good movie.

NOV 23, 2007 - JODIE FOSTER RETURNS TO HER OLD STOMPING GROUNDS – the degenerate sin-city that’s the New York of Taxi Driver, where every other person on the street is out to rape and mug and kill – in Neil Jordan’s terminally confused The Brave One, which can’t decide whether to condone vigilantism, explore its consequences, or celebrate it. And as long as we’re talking tripartite confusion, neither can the film decide whether to aspire to the violence-is-inside-every-one-of-us thesis of Straw Dogs, the psychological and moral dimensions of the avenging angel in Taxi Driver, or simply the audience-pleasing revenge-fantasia elements of Death Wish. (In fact, the madly compromised ending suggests all three.)

Despite the clumsy stabs at classiness – Foster, who plays radio-show host Erica Bain, quotes Emily Dickinson at one point (“Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me�) — The Brave One is a virtual parade of moments guaranteed to make it to the Neil Jordan Worst-of Collection. Who knew that this maker of Mona Lisa and The End of the Affair and The Butcher Boy and The Crying Game was capable of a scene as tasteless and brainless as the one where Erica and David (Naveen Andrews, as her impossibly perfect fiancé) are brought to a hospital after being viciously mugged, and we intercut between the present (the doctors slicing Erica’s clothes off before surgery) and the past (David sliding Erica’s clothes off before sex)?

It gets worse from thereon. David dies, and after the requisite period of arty mourning – off-kilter camera angles, bleached colours, the works – Erica sets out to get herself a gun. The man at the counter says she needs to apply for a license first, and it would take some thirty days. But she can’t wait that long – and luckily, help is at hand in the form of a screenwriting deus ex machina, a lowlife who just happens to overhear this conversation and who just happens to have an illegal nine-millimeter handgun for sale and who also just happens to possess the kindly disposition to teach her how to use the darned thing (after gypping her of a thousand bucks, of course). And voila: from victim to vigilante in three easy steps.

But this, at least, is merely idiotic – come on, when something is made by Jordan and stars Foster (who’s characteristically fine, and whose presence alone goes a long way in making the proceedings watchable), you don’t want to settle for this – and not offensive, like the depiction of blacks (who are either terrifying, bling-clad gangstas or saintly martyrs dispensing pap like “There’s plenty of ways to die, you have to figure out a way to live,� as the music swells). Terrence Howard is cast as an instance of the latter – he plays detective Sean Mercer, who’s investigating the vigilante killings – and all he’s asked to be is situational, on-the-other-side-of-the-law counterpoint to Erica. (They’re both lonely souls, they’re both after criminals they can’t seem to bring to justice, and so on.) But I guess this emasculation is only to be expected in a movie where Jodie Foster is the real hero.

The only thing interesting in The Brave One is its suggestion that the vigilante is an equal-part conflation of the superhero and the psycho-killer. This subtext – which must surely be what drew Jordan to the project in the first place, before Hollywood got its grubby hands all over it – is explored in the film’s mid-section, as Erica sees those black gangstas bullying the others in a train compartment. She coldly, calmly waits for them to turn to her, before she blows them away with the gun she’s got hidden. She’s not merely bringing to justice men who are evil, but actually dispensing this justice in an icily ruthless manner that suggests they deserved to die at her hands. Had the film changed gears at this point and proceeded to take a stand on Erica, it could have truly been a brave one.

ONE WAY TO GO ABOUT EVALUATING Elizabeth: The Golden Age is to look at it from a historical viewpoint, to see how those events circa 1585 have made it to screen in 2007. But for those of us not terribly familiar with the actual history, and whose only knowledge of the Virgin Queen (played once again by Cate Blanchett) comes from previous cinematic renderings (and perhaps an abridged version of Kenilworth), the only way to come at Shekhar Kapur’s nine-years-later follow-up to his Elizabeth is to treat it as just another period film, with just another story of courtly intrigues.

And Kapur, to his credit, realises this. A little into his film, he unleashes a sequence where the Queen’s court is regaled with exotica – a python, a zebra, a performing troupe that comes off like an Elizabethan-era Cirque du Soleil – and it’s tempting to read this as mirroring Kapur’s own agenda: to throw in our direction everything but the royal kitchen sink. He’s not ashamed to employ shamelessly overblown, Bollywoodian visual cues – firelight flames flicker in acknowledgement of Elizabeth’s kiss with Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), angry waves crash on the coast to reflect the turmoil of the Anglo-Spanish War – and this may well be the only period movie in history that gives us an underwater shot of a snow-white horse swimming across choppy sea waters. (Why? Because it looks cool, that’s why.)

But for all this pomp, there’s very little circumstance. There are at least three distinct narrative arcs – Protestant England versus Catholic Spain; Elizabeth versus Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton); the somewhat love-triangle that plays out between Raleigh, Elizabeth, and her homonymous lady-in-waiting (Abbie Cornish) – but the way Kapur keeps cutting to and away from them reduces everything to mere scenery, which Blanchett chews up with great, theatrical relish. One part of me wished that the actress had found something more interesting to do with this role, but then all her attention must have been focussed on preventing those scarily elaborate wigs from toppling off. Not for nothing did Shakespeare say uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

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