Last night I had the opportunity to see “The Brave One,” Hollywoods latest offering starring Jodie Foster. Despite my initial trepidation, I took the opportunity and I am glad I did. I have come to expect nothing better than warmed over leftist tripe from Hollywood, hence my trepidation – the story of a wronged woman buying a gun to exact revenge on her tormentors could play out several ways, not many of them having any more than a nodding acquaintance with reality. But Jodie Foster? Love her or hate her (I personally tend towards the “love” end of the spectrum), she has been cutting edge and fearless as long as I’ve been alive. I would rather gouge out my eyes with red hot pokers than sit through “Nell” again, but she had guts to do it. So, ultimately, I felt her talents and reputation rendered this movie deserving of a fair viewing and an honest appraisal.

This is the story of a New York radio show host who has it all, one might say. She loves her city, her job, her man, their dog. One night she and her fiance are victims of random street violence. He is killed and she barely survives. She comes out of a coma three weeks later to find her fiance’ has been buried and the dog is gone. Her return to their apartment is particularly poignant, as her memories make clear that what was once a home full of promise, love and hope for the future is now just a room full of stuff. Every stranger is now a potential attacker, every shadow a potential deathtrap. Terrified and helpless, she goes to a gun shop (the foreshadowing of this particular shop is obvious, but I liked it). It is here the story really begins – she can’t get a gun without a license. A license will take thirty days to acquire. Her protests that she won’t survive thirty days are met with a gruff “the law’s the law” type response from the shop owner, who one can easily imagine has heard it all before, is hamstringed by the laws that “protect” us, and just doesn’t have much energy left to give a damn. A man hears her exchange with the shop owner, offers her a black market firearm, and five minutes later she is armed.

I’ll spare the reader any additional plot spoilers, but some scenes in this movie should be discussed – they are what set this movie apart. Foster’s character finds out very quickly that this act of hideous, senseless violence, an act so horrible one wonders how any society that does not rise in outrage against it could lay any claim to the title “civilization,” is just another day in the life of a system that sees this all the time. What is so personal to her is barely a blip on the radar screen to the rest of the world, the city of which she once felt herself to be such an integral part. There is a particularly noteworthy scene (possibly my favorite) in which a policeman is questioning Foster, trying to impress upon her that she can talk to the police, that they are on her side. Foster’s response is priceless – “Why doesn’t it feel like it?”

She is entitled to an answer. We are entitled to an answer. She doesn’t get one. Neither have we.

But if you are looking for a movie that does a hatchet job on the police, this movie isn’t it. The depiction of individual policeman, their attitudes, their outlook, what they know about the world we live in (from basic human nature to gender differences), is easily the most realistic I’ve ever seen. The police are not presented sympathetically, neither are they cast as mindless drones self-righteously defending the system which issues them their paychecks. They are part of the system, part of the landscape, every feature of which contributes to the anomie that Foster fairly oozes. It may be a worthwhile intellectual/moral exercise for the viewer to honestly appraise their place in that landscape.

How are men depicted in this movie? Well, they cross the spectrum – some are heroic, some cowardly and vicious, most of them are somewhere in between. That’s reality as I know it. To be sure, they make sure to insert some appropriate caricatures – the wife-beater/murderer who operates without interference from the system (which we all know happens alllll the time), the victimizer of prostitutes who gets his jollies abusing the powerless – but overall, I just didn’t see the men bad/women good dichotomy I feared and was about halfway expecting. Perhaps “Thelma and Louise” set the bar so low that I was grateful for any depiction of men as redeemable, but I don’t think so. While one could correctly point out that most of the men in this movie fall into the “somewhere in between” to “cowardly and vicious” categories, with the women “somewhere in between” to “heroic,” I’ll leave it to others to bean count. Furthermore, the heroic men in this story stand head and shoulders above the rest, and these two caricatures are the only characters in this movie that did not precisely fit my memory of somebody (or a few somebodies) I have known through the years. Additionally, even those caricatures do exist – I just object to the idea one can walk randomly into an emergency room or down a street and find them. The society this movie depicts is immediately recognizable as a snapshot of the one we live in, and I’ll not criticize a movie for choosing reality over “affirmative action” fantasy.

I absolutely encourage everyone to see this movie, if only because it is a great movie. But I’ll see it again. Perhaps my dollars will in some small way serve to send moviemakers a message – if you must use movies to preach a social gospel, honesty and accuracy will be rewarded. This movie has both.