Actors typically flee from comparisons to their previous work, but not Foster, now 44. She freely admits that the resonances between “The Brave One” and Martin Scorsese’s nightmarish 1976 classic, starring Robert De Niro as a cabby who descends into madness, were a factor in her choice of the film. “When I first read the script, honestly, it didn’t remind me enough of ‘Taxi Driver’,” Foster says. “That was one of my issues with it. There was all this room for something more beautiful.” “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.
Just before Erica and her fiancé walk into the Central Park tunnel where the attack occurs, we hear, off-screen, the roar of an airplane. It’s a tiny detail, but in New York, where that sound still makes some people shudder, it’s an unmistakable allusion. “Erica’s attitude toward New York changes when this specter of violence enters her life,” Foster says. “Once that fear has touched you, you realize that it was there all along. And she hates herself for it, because she knows it’s not rational. She knows there isn’t a bogeyman waiting behind every bush.” Her fear makes her feel powerless, and to stamp it out, she begins carrying a gun and putting herself in situations where she might have to use it. In the middle of her spree, she rescues a young prostitute from a vicious pimp—an echo of “Taxi Driver,” only in that film Foster played the prostitute. This time, she’s Travis Bickle. When the pimp runs over the young woman with his car, her first words to Erica are telling. Dazed, she says, “Is this still America?”
To the extent that “The Brave One” is a political film, that’s the question at the heart of it. When Erica returns to her radio show, anger pours out of her. Listeners call in and spew jingoistic rants about Iraq and terrorism. “I’ve always been fascinated by American points of view toward violence,” says Jordan, an Irishman. “The death penalty in the U.S. is a kind of legalized revenge, isn’t it? You’ve even kind of admitted to that fact, too, the way that families of the victim can attend the execution.” Vigilante films put the power of the death penalty squarely in the hands of their heroes, and such movies tend to get made during anxious moments in a culture—during, say, wartime or an urban crime wave, when the notion of justice seems elusive, even naive. These films also tend to be morally dubious, validating the way bloodlust perverts our principles about the rule of law. (Later this fall, Kevin Bacon will star in a movie about a father determined to kill off the gangbangers who killed his son. It’s called “Death Sentence.”)
Some critics will surely write off “The Brave One” as just another revenge movie, but Foster is adamant that hers is a critique of those films, not the latest version of one. “This is a genre film. It is a thriller. But Erica is wrong,” she says. “And that’s definitely the point of view of the film: she’s getting sicker.” The cruel joke of “Taxi Driver” was that Travis Bickle’s sickness turned him into a tabloid hero. But in “The Brave One,” there are no more heroes. Just lots of people with blood on their hands.
