No justice, no grief

Two recently released films appear to have a lot in common. “The Brave One,” starring Jodie Foster, and “In the Valley of Elah,” starring Tommie Lee Jones, each feature main characters who lose someone they love to a murder, and on their path of responding to the crime, team up with a police detective. In both, perpetrators record and keep their crimes on cell phones, apparently oblivious to their potential as evidence, or sure of their impunity. But the similarities get thin from there on out.

“The Brave One” focuses on individual anguish in isolation. Foster’s Erica Bain, a radio show host in Manhattan whose fiancé is killed and she nearly so in a Central Park attack by thugs, cuts herself off from friends and family, her body infused with fear. Jones, as Hank Deerfield, begins with the distrust of a lifelong Army man, but he listens, even when his grief is acute. Informed his son who’s been fighting in Iraq has gone AWOL, he finds he’s been murdered and dismembered outside an Army base in the United States. He asks questions. Bain, on the other hand, takes phone calls live on the radio, cutting off callers’ mostly clichéd comments after less than a sentence. Without real contact with other people, evil and good become petrified, inhuman, and there is no way out except mortal revenge. In the course of the story, Bain kills eight bad men, guys you wouldn’t want to meet. The exception to this black and white moral universe is a cop who at first seems to be using the law for justice, but soon enough avers that he’d like to take the law into his own hands, wishes someone else would “do our work for us” – meaning take out the bad guys. In the end, he too opts for obliterating the bad, without ever seeking to find out who they are.

Deerfield, on the other hand, asks why people do things. He witnesses the ethical shadows and contradictions in people. His qualities of observation are instrumentalist, for sure: he wants to find out who killed his son. But he also wants to find out who his son was. And this film is about a condition, a place (a valley), not just the individuals who inhabit it. In the Valley of Elah, you understand how good people in this place – which is the war in Iraq, but also the United States - become awful people, or at least people who do awful things. In “The Brave One” bad people appear to be born mean, so that the only solution is to smoke them. It’s a case of poor imagination. At least, in the “Valley,” you can imagine a world – distressed and in grief, saddled with racism and patriarchy, but a world – that knows how to respect life.