In spite of her outstanding performance, Jodie Foster’s latest film is deeply flawed. The simplicity of the plot (one evening whilst out walking with her fiancé, putting the finishing touches to their wedding plans, Erica Bain (Foster) and David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews) are accosted by a gang of thugs who proceed to beat David to death and leave Erica in a coma for three weeks. Dismayed by the apparent indifference of the police, Erica illegally procures a gun and proceeds to seek vengeance, not only on her own behalf, but wherever she encounters seemingly arbitrary violence and abuse) is misleading in that certain serious issues are dealt with, although the credibility of their treatment is somewhat undermined by the apparent vindication of vigilante-style summary justice, as well as its portrayal of the “lower orders”.

The narrative is structured around the themes of class, race and gender. The opening scene establishes Erica’s credentials as an upper middle-class, cosmopolitan intellectual, thereby embodying all the virtues of the post-modern, mobile, reflexive, tolerant self. She works in the media, representing its contemplative rather than its viciously commercial and gratuitously exploitative and sensationalistic side. Her City Walks feature bears an uncanny resemblance to the literary blog genre, a distillation in miniature of the bustling life of a great city, snippets vested with wider significance, weaving tales like Armistead Maupin or Paul Auster. Her integrity is made explicit during the scene where the assembled press pack bays for information about the subway shootings (ironically committed by Bain herself, casting a doubt on the purity of her motives for attending the conference). Whilst they push and shove themselves forward, jostling for the best spot to record sound and images, she watches in silence, rewarded when Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard) seeks her out afterwards and reassures her that he is aware of the difference between her and the more eagerly ambitious members of the journalistic profession. Earlier, she had established a relationship of trust with him by editing out segments of their interview, which could potentially cause him trouble and by preserving his anonymity. Likewise, when her producer, swallowing her scepticism against her better judgement, invites Bain to host a phone-in due to the overwhelming audience response to the latter’s broadcast in which she admits to her epiphany concerning the darker aspects of city reality, Bain herself confesses on air to how she has compromised her principles. An indignant fan vehemently objects to the entire exercise: “I don’t know why you are hosting this programme”, to which the uncomfortable reply: “Neither do I, next caller”. When the ratings and revenue imperatives encroach the result is highly damaging.

Given the need to maintain sympathy for the main character, the scriptwriters are at pains to demonstrate that she is not racist. This is achieved by two devices: her fiancé and the bond of mutual respect and admiration that develops between her and Detective Mercer (it is a tribute to Howard’s supreme skill that he is able to breathe life into one of the most careworn clichés of the crime genre, the cop with a heart of gold, whose marriage has foundered because he cares too much and cannot disengage from the more distressing cases he is forced to deal with, his solitary existence vital to the plot economy), which culminates in his conferring absolution on her for her deeds. David is British-Indian, which both inscribes him as doubly exotic and conveniently removes him from the American class system/racial hierarchy. However, he too is clearly identified as an upper-middle class, mobile professional (we see him in his surgeon’s gown, positioning him amongst the elite of medical practitioners).

Bain’s victims are, to a man, far below her on the social scale. Her first killing at a convenience store blends vengeance with self-defence. A half-deranged, dishevelled white male bursts in and guns down his Vietnamese wife (note the allusion to the discourse of the submissiveness and placidity of Oriental women; indeed he murders her for having the temerity to defy him). His shabby clothing and unshaven face suggest his lack of proper hygiene, of personal grooming, typical accusations levelled against those at the bottom of the social pecking order and therefore symbolic of both his class and moral degradation. He gloats over the dead body of the woman who bore his children and is about to rob the till of the takings when Bain’s mobile goes off. Desperate to liquidate a potential witness against him, he stalks the well-stacked aisles, yet Bain prevails. Before leaving, she has the mental wherewithal to remove the CCTV tape covering her tracks.

The two young black men on the subway bully their fellow passengers, in a swaggering, bravado-filled display of macho dominance based on their arrogant confidence in their physical strength. They steal an i-pod from a geeky (and correspondingly spindly and effete) white teenager and intimidate an older black male who tries to dissuade them from their unnecessary bullying. They show utter contempt for authority, in this particular instance the authority conferred by age and experience, even from within their own ethnic group (this reminds us of the culturally determined diminution of status/value that accompanies ageing in our Western societies, the impotence engendered by the presumed loss of faculties and the ebbing of strength; his terrified grandchild’s helplessness a function of his infancy, he has not yet assumed power). Whilst the other occupants of the carriage seize the opportunity to escape as the subway pulls into the next station, Bain stays put. The implicit challenge issued by her refusal to bow their dominance is interpreted by them as a provocation, an act of insubordination, which they wish to punish. She, however, has abandoned “sensibleness”. Once again, the script has recourse to the deeply racist and offensive rhetoric of the primitive, sexualised black male as a potent threat to virtuous white women. The violence they promise to inflict on her is sexual: the blade is eroticised as it is run down her skin from her throat towards her womb. In an appalling pun referring back to her job, she is asked whether she will provide “Radiohead” (the band mentioned by the teenager as the one he was listening to when he failed to hear their demand that he hand over his i-pod). “Have you ever been fucked by a knife?” she is asked as they tower over her – her absolute vulnerability emphasised by their tall and imposing muscularity.

Wandering the streets in search of trouble, she is called over to a car by a kerb crawler who assumes she is a whore (his term) and offers to pay her for putting on a lesbian show on the back seat with a woman he has abducted and kept in a semi-conscious drugged state to prevent her flight (the sores from his cigarette burn torture clearly visible on her skin). Bain attempts to extract Chloe from the car, but he locks them both in, forcing her to pull out her weapon. He lapses into the denigratory vernacular reducing women to their sexual organs, branding Bain a “supercunt”, to which she retorts that if he doesn’t open the doors straight away, she will be “the last supercunt you will ever see”. As Bain guides Chloe to safety, he decides to run them over to erase the insult to his manhood he has received, but Erica blasts a bullet through his brain and the careering vehicle strikes Chloe to Bain’s dismay.

Murrow is portrayed as an evil mastermind (in contrast to the mindless thugs who engage in petty opportunistic acts of theft and beating, the intellectual effort of planning and organising thereby assigned to the white criminal, the purely physical to the non-white), whom Detective Mercer has been relentlessly pursuing for years. When we are first introduced to Mercer, he is in the same hospital to which Bain is admitted after the attack (and he sees her bruised and battered body lying inert on the bed), called in because the criminal’s wife has been found shot in the head in an apparent suicide (eliciting the comment that in the police officer’s experience women do not tend to put the gun to their temples, again the brain symbolising intellect and rationality, but to their hearts, the seat of the emotions). Mercer’s empathic proficiency is shown in his sensitive handling of interviewing the traumatised daughter, interrupted when Murrow comes bursting in. Mercer’s efforts to protect the girl by having her made a ward of court are thwarted by the latter, determined to stop her from blurting out the truth of her mother’s untimely death.

Bain dispatches Murrow with a crowbar before throwing him over the parapet of a multi-storey car park (adopting a new MO to throw the police off her trail). Although on the surface Murrow appears to be of a higher social class than the others, he is revealed as an impostor as he amassed his wealth by dishonest means. Whereas he possesses all the outward trappings of affluence, he is little more than a clothes horse, devoid of true “class”. His upward mobility did not conform to the traditional middle-class ideal of “merit”, or the working-class avenue to advancement of “bettering oneself”. It was not accompanied by the painstaking process of study and acquisition of “taste”.

Bain’s final targets are the members of the gang who killed David, of Hispanic extraction.

Their initial crime can be viewed on one level as motiveless, the product of an unfortunate (and random) crossing of paths. On another, however, it is presented as the the inevitable outcome of chance interaction/collision between the irredeemably immoral lowlifes and the better off whom they passionately resent. There is no contact between social classes in this film, no interaction except when the “scum” intrude to disrupt, to maim, rob and kill. Criminality is lazily conflated with class, the less privileged pathologised. Moreover, class is confused with essence, depicted as a natural quality which inheres, and permeates every aspect of being. This denies the possibility of upward movement, of improving one’s lot as the class of your birth will forever taint you. Scum can disguise itself, but will always remain scum underneath. Detective Vitale, for example, expresses disbelief that the i-pod could have been the property of the two black youths on the subway based on its playlist, which included U2, suggesting that even such minor details as musical tastes are class and race-determined. At no point is the audience ever invited to feel sympathy towards the men Bain dispatches. We are not asked to reflect upon the predicament faced by these excluded individuals whose hyper-masculinity is adopted as a shield against abuse in a brutal environment. They are walking stereotypes without any individuating character, a distillation of middle-class anxieties about the encroaching underclass. They receive their just desserts.

Recourse to such oversimplifications and to old racist myths detracts from the film’s incisive criticisms of male privilege and its commendable effort to tackle the phenomenon of gender-based violence against women and the inability of the legal and judicial systems to deliver justice to women.

Detectives Mercer and Vitale take it for granted that the vigilante murders were committed by a man. Vitale states this quite plainly: women do not kill strangers, they kill their spouses and partners. Women’s violence stems from self-defence, from being pushed to breaking point by years of abuse or is retributive (as opposed to opportunistic or the ultimate means of enforcing privilege as we see with the black youths on the subway offended by Bain’s defiant presence in the carriage).

There is a powerful juxtaposition at the beginning of the film of tenderness and the after-effects of brutality (Erica and David are shown making love, her underwear gently removed by him, contrasted with an image of scissors slicing through their fabric as they are taken off by the medical team), of love and hate. Violence in the film is the preserve of lower-class men, the police who are legally sanctioned to preserve and enforce order by means of it and Bain as the avenging angel. This is also conveyed by the ineptitude of the punch David swings at one of the gang members groping at Erica. His greater acculturation means that he has lost the connection with the inner brute whilst the thugs, less perfectly assimilated to the norms of civilised intercourse, can deal out blows with deadly accuracy. In reality, however, belonging to the “respectable” middle-class is no guarantee of restraint. Wife-battering transcends social class and the film’s contention that income and education are foolproof inhibitors perniciously distorts the truth (yet another reason for the audience to feel smug about their relative enlightenment).

Male violence is as ubiquitous as male privilege, as manifested in the story of Bain’s neighbour Josai (Ene Oloja) who fled from her homeland to seek refuge in America yet is confronted by it again in her new surroundings when she stitches Erica’s wound. In her country, she relates, young boys were handed guns and ordered to shoot their parents to prove that there was no boundary that could not be crossed. Male violence against women is thus shown to be all-pervasive. To my mind the most evocative scene in the entire film occurs when Bain finally summons the courage to leave her apartment for the first time following her release from hospital. We see her legs walking along the pavement when another pair of legs falls in behind her in appropriately menacing black shoes and trousers. Unsure as to whether she is being followed, she quickens her pace, yet he matches it, compounding her terror. Such uncertainty and fear has been experienced by every woman at some stage in their lives. In public space we are taught that we can never fully relax, we must constantly be on our guard against male depredation, a completely carefree stroll is not an option. Even after so many years of valiant feminist struggle, women’s occupation of public space remains ambiguous and fraught. Consigned to the domestic sphere we are reassured that we are safe indoors, at home, yet women are more likely to be killed by their own partners than the random stranger conjured up to keep us compliant.

In the film, justice is available only to those who can afford it (by forking out for the most expensive and competent lawyers). The law can be evaded as in the case of the i-pod teenager who is not hauled in to make a statement concerning the subway incident because his father has the connections to prevent it. Thus the privileged are able to walk away, not become involved if they don’t want to. The system can be manipulated by the ruthless and corrupt, provided they have enough money to pay for it. Murrow exploits justice to commit a palpable injustice, to pervert true justice to suit his own ends.

The system is also shown to be indifferent to the suffering of victims, poignantly articulated when Bain visits her local precinct to enquire about the progress made in the investigation. The officer at the desk types in David’s name before pointing her in the direction of the waiting room: “I realise this is very difficult for you, but could you please take a seat and an officer will see you soon”. At first we believe that his words signified genuine concern, but they are exposed as nothing but an empty formula when each new arrival (predominantly women) is greeted in identical fashion. Only officers of exceptional dedication willing to make the kind of personal investment that can exact a devastating toll (such as wrecked marriages) such as Detective Mercer can offer any hope of redress, yet they are the exception to the rule of deadening, jaded resignation and self-preserving withdrawal from emotional involvement (Vitale).

Only Bain in vigilante mode can offer the women, abused and exploited by men what the male-devised law cannot dispense and they collude with her in exchange, allowing her to avoid being brought to justice for transgressing the limits prescribed by it. Even the gang member’s girlfriend (coded as lower class through her noisy petulance, short skirt, huge hooped earrings) overcomes her perfectly justifiable reluctance (she would be beaten to a pulp should it emerge that she had betrayed him by passing on information concerning his whereabouts) to help. In other words, the solidarity of the oppressed overcomes less fundamental divisions of class, nationality and background. The women share the disadvantages culturally designated inferiority, united by their gender, separated only by the degree to which their subordination is mitigated, cushioned or exacerbated by other factors such as class and race. In the end this brings them round to Bain’s perspective and the middle-class values she represents, thereby affirming them.

In drawing to a close, I would like to comment on one further scene when the i-pod (a middle-class accessory if ever there was one) teenager is asked to give a description of the woman on board the subway. Vague on the details of her face, he takes obvious pleasure in recalling sexual characteristics such as her blondeness, her backside and “titties”. The interviewing officer is a slender blonde herself and endeavours to steer him back towards the information required. He is socially inept, having not yet acquired the self-censorship skills (tact) to differentiate between what is appropriate in such situations and what is not. The resultant composite image is that of Jennifer Anniston. The build-up of tension (will his memory be accurate enough to incriminate Erica?) is dissipated in humour – she is saved by his immaturity and teenage hormone-driven lust. Yet at the same time as the male propensity for remembering (and attaching value to) only the anonymous sexual features (the face being the part of the body where individuality is most concentrated, the place where emotions and personality are expressed) is subjected to ridicule, it is also grudgingly tolerated (”boys will be boys”) and deemed normal.

I would be lying if were to claim that I did not derive a visceral pleasure and sense of satisfaction at watching Jodie Foster’s diminutive figure blowing away abusive hoodlums, but the film appears to advocate this as the only remedy. As an intelligent and discerning feminist I am convinced that her focus was more on the real question of how to obtain justice for the millions of women who are raped, genitally mutilated, bruised and battered every hour of every day, on exposing the shortcomings of the system as we know it. The Brave One in one respect is a compensatory fantasy for those who cannot fight back or who are exasperated and exhausted by the endless struggle to make change happen. It may be frustratingly, painfully slow, yet change must be fought for in the courts, through political action and resistance rather than down the barrel of a gun, no matter how occasionally appealing such a thought might be.