The Brave One.

"At first glance, Neil Jordan directing a Joel Silver-produced vigilante movie starring Jodie Foster looks like an incongruous grouping of elements," suggests Scott Foundas as part of this week's LA Weekly cover package on The Brave One. And he's just popping the first question for the director. A little further in, he just comes right out and asks, "Do you feel that the movie justifies revenge killing?"

"Foster gives a delicate, extremely internal performance in The Brave One, a performance sickening in its muted agony," writes Judith Lewis, introducing her interview:

Updated through 9/10.

It's precisely because Erica is not a big ball of emotion, but instead a credible portrait of an emotionally isolated, intellectual woman in the throes of suffering, that you do not for a moment doubt her motivation to acquire a gun and patrol the streets of her once-beloved New York City. And that's finally what makes The Brave One - a story as deliberately constructed as a parable - so hard to digest. Once people start dying at the end of that gun, empathizing with Erica no longer seems like a constructive response.

Foster knows this; she knows it as clearly as she knows that every one of her interviewers wants to ask her about those days after John Hinckley shot President Reagan purportedly to impress her, and whether she is in fact a lesbian. But not only does Foster seem to feel bound by a personal and professional duty to help journalists resolve the moral quandary of The Brave One, it's something she wants to talk about.

"The film that The Brave One most resembles, in fact, isn't Death Wish but another seminal 1970s film, one that made the 13-year-old Foster a star: Taxi Driver," writes Devin Gordon in Newsweek. "'When I first read the script, honestly, it didn't remind me enough of Taxi Driver,' Foster says.... Taxi Driver was very much a product of its era—of a grim moment when New York, mired in debt and ravaged by crime, was imploding. Similarly, The Brave One, in Foster and Jordan's hands, deepened into an allegorical tale about living with fear in post-9/11 New York: a surreal period when the city is, at once, the safest metropolis in the world and seemingly more vulnerable than ever to catastrophe."

Earlier: "Death Sentence (and a bit on The Brave One)."

Update: "[W]alking down 8th Avenue today, I stopped dead in my tracks in front of a shiny new billboard for The Brave One, Jodie Foster's latest exercise in paranoid victimology. And I realized two things: one, it's probably going to be good. And two, I am not going to see it." Gabriel Shanks explains.

Updates, 9/10: Foster "has become a genius escape artist, capable of being at once visible and somehow apart. Her entire life has been shaped by such dualisms: she is simultaneously brainy and beautiful, Disney and edgy, child and woman, girl and boy, the meticulous technician who cried on command but was bored by Mr De Niro's Method rehearsals," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "As she's gotten older, she seems to have embraced the hardness for which she has sometimes been criticized. In recent years, she's played several ferocious single mothers (Panic Room, Flightplan), a high-powered fixer in nosebleed heels (Inside Man) and even a one-legged nun (The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys). In The Brave One, she packs a gun and redeems the haunting child, the victim, who caused her so much pain. She has become the avenging angel of her own past."

"Jodie Foster delivers a performance far superior to her material in Neil Jordan's self-consciously provocative and largely absurd vigilante drama," writes Mike Goodridge in Screen Daily. "Attempting to hit the same hot buttons as other audacious studio movies like Falling Down or Foster's 20 year-old The Accused, it starts well but falls down fast as its plot becomes far-fetched and then spirals into the ethically dubious action genre associated with its producer Joel Silver."

"This is Death Wish meets Sex and the City, with all the seriousness that implies," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.

"This is not Flightplan or Panic Room (not to disparage them, they're immensely entertaining) - while these films both might seem, on a surface level, to be cousins to The Brave One (the marketing looks almost identical), they have no common denominators other than Foster playing a woman who manages to turn the tables," writes Matt Mazur at PopMatters. "This well-acted, sure-to-be popular entertainment has now become Foster's forte, and this time out she is supported by a stellar cast: Terrence Howard as a homicide detective who becomes intrigued by Erica, the marvelously wry Nicky Katt as his partner, Mary Steenburgen, Jane Adams, and even Zoe Kravitz (daughter of rocker Lenny and Lisa Bonet), all savor their smallish supporting turns."

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2007 5:54 AM