HARRY BROWN: Eleanor Rigby, With a Revolver
The new British crime thriller HARRY BROWN opens with some disturbing camcorder footage. A young man is initiated into an urban gang with a toke from a crack pipe and a vow on a handgun, and soon, he's senselessly murdering a mother as she pushes her baby's stroller. This is an attention-grabbing minute, but it's never returned to - not as a plot point, at least. Rather, these pre-credits atrocities act as short-hand justification for the violence we're about to see revisited on the gang. Immediately, we are meant to understand, and, more importantly, despise these young men.
And so, for a while at least, we do. Sir Michael Caine takes us through several days in the life of his titular protagonist Harry Brown, a pensioner living in the Elephant and Castle housing developments of London. Through powerfully stark visual storytelling, we watch Harry's life unravel: His long-suffering wife dies. He witnesses a brutal carjacking through his kitchen window, and does nothing. When his only friend Len tells Harry he's living in fear of the gang that's taken over their neighborhood, Harry tells him to call the police... But that night, Len winds up the gang's next victim. That's bad news for Harry, it's bad news for the gang, but more than that, it's bad news for the film.
The best material of HARRY BROWN comes in its early scenes, as Caine, superb as always, establishes his protagonist's subdued suffering with nuance, and first time feature director Daniel Barber is wise enough to linger on him. But as soon as HARRY BROWN becomes a proper revenge tale, Harry Brown loses all his nuance, and what begins promisingly as a character study of a desperate man turns into a disappointingly conventional death smorgasbord.
Yes, Harry, a former Marine, has a few sadistic tricks up his sleeve, and turns stone cold quicker than you can say 'Law Abiding Citizen a Film By F. Gary Gray.' While HARRY's second portion (said smorgasbord) has some entertaining moments, mostly stemming from the humor of an old asthmatic matter-of-factly off'ing strung-out lowlifes, there's a nagging facility to the proceedings. Though it's set up and paid off as a modern Western, when compared to a film as complex and ruminative as the modern Western UNFORGIVEN, HARRY looks simply brutal. Let's not mince words: Harry Brown kills kids. Bad kids, but kids; a whole bunch of them. (Incongruously, in another scene, he kills grown men too, only because he wants to save the life of a kid. A junkie kid, but a kid.) Harry's a slum savior, yet one with no mercy for gang youth, who, it's suggested in the story of the film (not to mention indicated by the facts of objective reality,) have turned to thug life to escape hardship, abuse, and neglect. But, forget all that. Didn't you see that camcorder footage?
HARRY BROWN's most glaring fault, however, isn't its uncomplicated embrace of vigilantism, but its boring and perfunctory police subplot, which finds poor Emily Mortimer playing Detective Inspector Frampton, who's always one step behind dirty Harry... Almost all the patter between her and her partner Sergeant Hickock (Charlie Creed Miles) is stilted and pointless; not only does their detective work lead, really, to any valuable discovery, but neither cops are likable, or even distinct characters, which makes their inevitable jeopardy in the film's finale a yawn. As a riot breaks out in the projects (for reasons un-established and un-resolved,) the focus on Harry Brown is all but lost in HARRY BROWN, a big mistake on the part of Barber, who should know well enough that Michael Bloody Caine is by far his film's biggest asset.
By the time Harry re-enters the action, the film has all but sputtered into a logic-devoid muddle. There's a Western-style showdown, but for a film as apparently grave as this, the sequence doesn't earn the basic suspension of disbelief it requires. (Not so much the OK Corral as the 'Meh' Corral.) And in the midst of the shootout climax, finally, the question of almost every revenge drama is asked: 'When will it end?' When will the cycle of violence reach its conclusion? But then, almost as soon as the question's raised, it's conveniently answered - with villains of both younger and older generations, the slum puppeteers and their teenage puppets, bloodily and, it seems, deservedly defeated.
Unlike most serious revenge pictures, which at least make the suggestion that the child will repay the murder of their elder, if not today then in the fullness of things, HARRY BROWN makes the point that if you're gonna kill the lion, just make sure you take care of that cub too. And - BLAM! - there's your happy ending.
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www.stevenspielblog.com
