The Damaged One

I like Jodie Foster. I think she's made some interesting career choices--some boldly non-commercial ones--and she seems a person with integrity and a certain strength of character. Though she splashed onto everyone's radar over 30 years ago as the young prostitute in Taxi Driver, I think it was really her fabulous turn as Clarice Starling in 1991's The Silence of the Lambs that made her a household word.

Well, that and a president getting shot specifically to impress her.

She has flirted on the edge of super-stardom for a couple decades now, and yet has managed to retain control of her life and career in impressive and admirable fashion. In most every way, she's the anti-Britney. I was eager to see her new film, The Brave One, from the first preview I saw. The film looked thoughtful and provocative, and her involvement made me think it would not be as commercial as most films like this must be tempted to be.

Director Neil Jordan I knew of from The Crying Game, a film from 15 years ago which will primarily be remembered for a five second clip involving the since-disappeared Jaye Davidson. Jordan also directed the grim WWII film The End of the Affair nearly a decade ago (among other things), but I'd not seen any of his work since then.

This new film hit every right button with me. Jodie Foster plays Erica Bain, a New York radio show host who is the victim of a brutal crime. Out for a walk in Central Park at night, she and her fiancé are attacked by thugs and he is killed and she nearly so. The movie follows her rather unconventional attempts to cope in the aftermath of such a life-changing tragedy. Her path crosses that of a New York City police detective named Mercer, played by Terrence Howard, who is on the fringe of her case and is gradually drawn in.

The slow-moving relationship between Bain and Mercer is the emotional heart of the film, with Bain the cerebral and heavily damaged crime victim trying to cope and understand and move on, and Mercer playing a very human man doing an almost-undoable job; his probing nature as a detective sees him gradually drawn into the far inner regions of another person's suffering.

Both these leads are brilliant. There's enough in the story to give us a 3-D view of these people, and to make us care about what they're going through, and there is a constant, nagging suspense throughout the film between these two characters. Bain's torment at how her tragedy has changed her (and her sense that the careening path on which she's been launched is both wrong and unsustainable) eats at her and makes her yearn for some release; to her, Mercer is someone who may have to arrest her, but also someone who knows and understands a bit of what she suffers. On the other side is Mercer's admiration for and sympathy with Bain even as it dawns on him exactly what the lay of the land is.

The challenge is not in how effectively the characters bring us along on their journeys, but figuring out what to make of this violent twist to the basic plot. Faced with a police and legal system which seem unable to bring her closure and relief, the main character just takes her personal safety and the resolution of her case into her own hands. I mean, in theory that's honorable and admirable, but in practice it may or may not be, depending on your point of view. Parts of the movie play like a monthly handgun magazine, which seem always to have stories about "how my gun rights helped me thwart the criminals who sought to kill me and rape my wife and children." There is an inherent vigilante satisfaction in seeing scumbags absorbing a lethal diet of heavy metal, though my skepticism always rears up that these stories, statistically, have more bad endings than good ones.

If you're inclined to chew on these things, this movie places the issue front and center, without taking sides too strongly. The world is a violent place, and this movie doesn't make a case for what we might do to mitigate that violence. Rather, this is a small, human story involving two people trying to make sense in a world that sometimes isn't sensible. Like rats in a maze, we learn as much from the wrong turns as from the right ones. Highly recommended.

Grade: A