She'll Take Manhattan
PODHORETZ, JOHN
She'll Take Manhattan Who would have thought we'd yearn for Charles Bronson? by John Podhoretz The Brave One is a new movie with Jodie Foster that bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1974...
...I say "more than a passing resemblance" because I don't want to use the word "plagiarism...
...Bacon's character goes out, kills the guys who murdered his teenage son, and then comes home and gets in a shower and and trembles as though he has just been asked to give a donation to the Republican National Committee...
...You'd think she was voluntarily agreeing to a root canal without anesthetic, not blowing bad guys away with a 9-millimeter pistol...
...The safest big city in America...
...Death Wish's portrait of a city gone bad, a city in which the authorities no longer know how to protect citizens from criminals and don't even seem to care very much, may have been melodramatic and hysterical—and its equal-opportunity insistence that there be a white mugger for every black and Hispanic mugger was ridiculous—but it was emotionally true to the time...
...Actually, I don't think it's something anybody but Otis the Town Drunk would do...
...The Brave One fails, and fails abjectly, because it's a movie about a vigilante made by people who are repelled by the very notion of vigilantism...
...The audience punishers have trapped themselves, because their audiences are punishing them right back by laughing at the movies they've made...
...It has the same dramatic conflict, as a good New York City cop (Vincent Gardenia in the old one, Terrence Howard in the new one) acts as the sympathetic but stern voice of the law...
...by John Podhoretz The Brave One is a new movie with Jodie Foster that bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1974 movie with Charles Bronson called Death Wish...
...But these implausibilities and falsehoods wouldn't really matter except for one primary flaw...
...Guffaws and cackles broke out at a critics' screening of The Brave One and at a multiplex viewing of Death Sentence during the climactic moments of each film...
...Jodie Foster isn't an avenging angel, righting wrongs...
...Foster's character says, in a voice dripping with enraged irony, that "New York is the safest big city in America"—which it is—but the New York we see in The Brave One is as dangerous as the New York of Death Wish...
...In The Brave One, the police detective who has been the voice of reason suddenly demands that Jodie Foster shoot the bad guy who killed her boyfriend with his police revolver so she can get away...
...To take the most obvious problem, Death Wish was made at a time when New York City was awash in random violent crime—and at a time when the rising tide of crime was a consuming preoccupation for everyone in the country...
...I don't think this is something a righteous vigilante would do...
...The New York of The Brave One wouldn't even be the safest big city in Colombia...
...The Brave One's portrait of present-day New York is also melodramatic, but it's emotionally false...
...Oops...
...The Brave One really ought to be a better movie than Death Wish...
...Maybe even more dangerous than the New York of 1974...
...And yet Death Wish remains a crackling classic, while The Brave One is a lugubrious disaster...
...Foster does nothing but shake and tremble and cry and moan and suffer during and after the scenes in which she pops the evildoers...
...She just happens to be in a bodega when a man comes in and shoots his wife dead...
...After all, nobody is out there clamoring for vigilante movies, just as nobody is clamoring for vigilantes...
...She just happens to be walking down a dark street when a man solicits her for sex and turns out to have a doped-up girl in his backseat whom he kidnapped from Las Vegas six days earlier...
...That's just perverse...
...The Brave One and Death Sentence are revenge fantasies that want to punish their audiences for seeking the wish fulfillment of a revenge fantasy...
...Bronson's wife is murdered and his daughter viciously beaten, while Foster's boyfriend is murdered and she is viciously beaten...
...And it was made with such urgency that Death Wish remains a seminal motion-picture portrait of America in the 1970s...
...Caution: spoilers ahead...
...In The Brave One, she is an entirely coincidental witness to and participant in five major violent crimes in the space of a few weeks...
...Hollywood clearly decided it was time to trot out the genre again, and it's not the audience's fault that it hired people who are so stunted by political correctness that they can't even imagine why someone might believe he was acting nobly by taking the law into his own hands...
...After all, in Death Wish, Charles Bronson goes around the Upper West Side at night trying to lure muggers into attacking him so that he can dispatch them with ruthless finality...
...It has the same plotline, as an effete upscale liberal New Yorker (Bronson an architect, Foster a public-radio broadcaster) decides to take violent revenge against the city's criminals after a loved one is murdered by a gang of young thugs...
...There's even a ludicrous moment when she comes home after a killing, jumps in the shower with her clothes on, and proceeds to soap up her shirt sleeve...
...The Brave One has the same Upper West Side setting as Death Wish...
...Oddly enough, there's another recent Hollywood release about a vigilante called Death Sentence, this one starring Kevin Bacon, that does exactly the same thing...
...And that's as preposterous as the fact that there seem to be only two cops in New York (Howard and the very amusing Nicky Katt) investigating every single crime in every single borough...
...What are they going to do, play a rubber match to see who gets to be the club racquetball champ...
...all, Jodie Foster is a greater actor than Bronson ever was...
...He has to seek out the bad guys...
...Not Jodie Foster...
...After John Podhoretz is movie critic for The Weekly Standard...
...The director of The Brave One, Neil Jordan, is a vastly more accomplished and thoughtful filmmaker (The Crying Game, Breakfast on Pluto) than Death Wish's vulgarian Michael Winner...
...At the climax of Death Sentence, Bacon looks at the man who killed his wife and, with a kind look on his face and a friendly tone in his voice, says, "Ready...
...she's someone who's been driven to psychopathology by her traumatic experience...
...Ready...
Vol. 13 • September 2007 • No. 1
