This much is clear as soon as The Brave One opens, offering a glimpse of Erica’s pre-trauma existence. The conceit is poetic, but unsustainable. Much as Travis’ post-Vietnam war New York mirrored him, violent, filthy, and infuriating, Erica’s reflects her. She is instead, her film proposes, an inversion of Travis born of her own moment. She has no savior, frightening or otherwise. For an instant, when her shoulders slouch just slightly and her eyes dart to avoid a gaze, she could even be Iris, looking warily at her frightening would-be savior Travis Bickle across the table in the diner where he’s buying her breakfast. But there it is: when Erica appears, post-trauma, in short hair and a patterned t-shirt, her smallness emphasizing her toughness, she could be Iris 30 years on. While such characteristics have become typical of Foster’s recent work (say, her turns as resourceful, protective mothers in Panic Room and Flightplan), Erica also recalls one of her earliest and most haunting roles, as a child, young, kohl-eyed Iris Steensma.Īt first, the connection to Taxi Driver, across so many years and movies and, of course, John Hinckley, seems startling. This time, as radio talk-essayist Erica Bain, she’s alternately steely and scared, restive and perplexed. Terribly titled and audaciously plotted, The Brave One offers another chance to watch Jodie Foster piece together a complicated, determined character, again trying to make sense of a chaotic world. –Neil Jordan, LA Weekly (5 September 2007) That’s part of what the movie is exploring. I think even people who are to the left in the United States are confused, and there’s a lot of fear, a nameless fear.

We’re in unknown territory, and people genuinely don’t know what to feel.

Nobody can explain why a doctor in Glasgow set himself on fire in a truck laden with explosives - a sophisticated, Western-educated person.

Erica the brave one