Sweet revenge

From left, actor Terrence Howard, actress Jodie Foster and director Neil Jordan at the press conference for their film The Brave One. (Evan Agostini/Getty Images)

Ah, the Toronto International Film Festival! Once a year, the city plays host to journalists from around the world (there are apparently 1,000 members of the fifth estate accredited for this, the 32nd edition), all of whom look decidedly unwell. Barely 12 hours into the festival, there is already a slick patina of sweat greasing yellowed foreheads in the press conference room on the second floor of the downtown Sutton Place Hotel. It doesn’t help that the room’s climate control is not up to the dozens of camera lights and the caffeine-jacked body heat: everyone looks, at best, disheveled.

This makes the sartorial comportment of those on stage doubly impressive. I count three well-tailored suit jackets: Mega-producer Joel Silver wears a vast pink blazer, star Terrence Howard – of Hustle and Flow and Crash – wears a slick powdered blue number, and the inimitable Jodie Foster wears a subtle Chanel jacket, buttoned, with denim and high heels. Irish auteur Neil Jordan – director of The Crying Game and Butcher Boy – lets the side down with a wrinkled linen button-up; he’s the weak link in an otherwise remarkable display of Hollywood panache, recalling a time when stars did not do interviews in trackpants, and wore fur in the dog days of summer.

This old-school display of style is appropriate for The Brave One, a movie that self-consciously recalls – and tries to subvert – the 70s revenge exploitation picture. Jodie Foster plays Erica Bain, a woman who finds the monster within after she and her fiancé are the victims of a vicious attack in Central Park. Her lover dead, her life in turmoil, she descends into a spiral that manifests itself in the gun she now carries – a means both to dispense justice and to abuse it absolutely. It’s a genre that, as we saw in the recent Kevin Bacon vehicle Death Sentence, can be visceral but deeply soulless – catharsis porn. But judging by the highfalutin talk up on the podium, The Brave One aspires to more than cheap thrills.

It doesn’t start out as a deep philosophical discussion. I learn that Neil Jordan likes many of Joel Silver’s pictures (he has produced genre-defining smashes such as Die Hard and The Matrix along with dogs like The Matrix Revolutions). “Does that surprise you?” asks Jordan, in his gentle brogue.

Not necessarily, but shortly thereafter I hear the word “materialize” used as a transitive verb, in the Kantian sense. Twice actually, on both occasions from Ms. Foster, who is a youthful 44, sharp-featured, and more beautiful than she looks on screen. And, clearly, twice as smart. Famously, she interrupted her career to pursue an English literature degree at Yale, which she appears to have combined with some considerable extra-curricular reading. “That gun materializes her,” says Ms. Foster of her character, who becomes something else when she opts for vengeance of the high-calibre, semi-automatic variety. Her character “is able to lay claim to a humanity she never knew she had – which is at once beautiful, and at once absolutely monstrous.”

Jodie Foster plays vigilante Erica Bain in The Brave One. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

One no longer expects to hear such things at TIFF, which is less about Cinema with a capital “C” than it is about people with Starbucks lanyards yakking into Blackberries. Nonetheless, the brave ones of The Brave One leap into high pay-grade philosophy without regard for the consequences.

Even Silver, who is apparently the model for countless Hollywood shyster characters (Steve Martin used him as inspiration in Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon, and he forms at least part of Ari Gold’s DNA in Entourage), has stepped up the level of discourse for the occasion. “I always try to make films that are more than just action films. This really was a collaboration…and when Jodie came on board, it really was as a partner. Everyone on board was trying to do something special.” He misses no clichés, but they are polished clichés.

However, the Socrates Award for Random Philosophical Musings must go to Terrence Howard. “In life, there is a strange dichotomy between the laws of nature and the laws of man. I think that’s where we’re at as humanity. I think the film asks all those questions. I saw it mainly as a film of recompense.”

The filmmakers juggle the notion that The Brave One has echoes of two iconic, if completely different, 70s revenge dramas – Taxi Driver and Death Wish. “Revenge theatre is good theatre – but those were different times and they were different movies,” says Silver.

“The film has a classic structure,” says Foster, “one I’m sure you’d find in Greek tragedy. But a better comparison [than Death Wish] is Taxi Driver or Straw Dogs.” There are differences, though. “Travis Bickle is primal – he reacts. [My character] is conscious – she is an intellectual. Also, Taxi Driver took place in post-Vietnam New York, which was degraded – he couldn’t win that war, but he could win the war here. Contrast this with a post 9/11 New York with a policeman on every corner where we should feel safe, but we don’t.”

When this is followed by a question asked in French, and answered in flawless Parisian Gallic by Ms. Foster, I wonder if this won’t be the TIFF that returns the festival to its film buff roots. No one asks Ms. Foster to substantiate the lesbian rumors that have long dogged her; no one asks how this movie relates to John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in her name. For a film rooted in a 70s tradition, it was film chatter that recalled that decade’s cinephile heyday. Post-conference, my Starbucks lanyard hung heavily, and when my Blackberry rang, I answered in shame. 

Richard Poplak is a Toronto writer. He’s covering TIFF press conferences for CBCNews.ca.

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