By Brandon Nolta

As a species, humanity likes revenge, the notion of payback. Every so often, Hollywood goes through a spate of films specifically about revenge, but it’s never very far from our narratives; it features prominently in lots of stories. It’s instructive to re-examine that drive every so often, which is what brings us to Jodie Foster’s latest film, THE BRAVE ONE. Happy moviegoers will be relieved to learn that it’s not a sermon as perhaps you might expect, but it’s got a lot more to say than most films of its type.

Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is a radio show host living in the Big Apple, enjoying life with her dog and doctor fiancé David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews). As fans of DAMAGES know, doctors named David aren’t experiencing happy lives in fiction right now, and Mr. Kirmani is no exception. While walking their dog one night, Erica and David are attacked by a group of thugs in a park tunnel and brutally beaten. David ends up dying from his wounds, while Erica gets to spend three weeks in a coma and wakes up bereft and emotionally damaged. Slowly, Erica progresses to where she can go outside again and resume her life, but she feels hollow, like someone moved into her head while she was away. To try and push past her fears, she buys a gun, and almost immediately finds herself in a position where she has to use it. The first time is justifiable, but the next times…not so much. Soon, she finds herself the target of a manhunt spearheaded by her new friend, kindly but determined Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard), and simultaneously afraid of and exhilarated by her new power.

There are a few key differences between THE BRAVE ONE and virtually every other revenge thriller out there. One would be the characters; both Erica and Mercer are well-developed, with histories and personalities that extend off the screen without driving the point home with a mallet. The bad guys are stereotypical and flat, but that is how Erica sees them, which buys right into one of the classic subtexts of revenge flicks, the idea that the vigilante is as much in the wrong as the criminals he or she hunts. Erica and Mercer, as well as Mercer’s partner (an amusing Nicky Katt, who gets the only funny lines in the whole film) and Erica’s boss (Mary Steenburgen), are all thoughtful, intelligent people who get the chance to display more than one trait or thought process, which is a nice change.


Another key difference, maybe the key difference that sets THE BRAVE ONE apart from its siblings, is fear. While Erica takes up free-range scumbag shooting partly out of a desire for revenge, her real motivation is fear: fear of the city she once loved, fear of the person she has become, fear of losing the last traces of her beloved partner. Foster shows us, in every way she can, that Erica has lost her center because of the overwhelming terror of her trauma, and although she appears to be coping throughout the film, she is truly sinking deeper into the abyss. By the end, which manages to take an interesting twist and come up with a superficially happy conclusion, Foster has made clear that the woman who bears Erica’s name truly died in that park tunnel; the new one may have her DNA and memories, but she isn’t the same. It’s a bold approach, and a sad one; while the ending as is feels improbable in a narrative sense, it hits the right tones emotionally.

Overall, THE BRAVE ONE is a successful film, although polarizing and at times difficult to take. The violence is bloody and bitter, and the complex viewpoint will make many viewers uneasy with a story that refuses to say, “X is right, Y is wrong.” Foster has expressed in interviews some ambivalence about audience response, and it seems warranted. Ambivalence, however, is not a bad thing with the right narrative, and THE BRAVE ONE is a fine example of a story that rightly calls for a little more mental sweat than usual.