 Starring: Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Nicky Katt, Naveen Andrews, Mary Steenburgen
Director: Neil Jordan
Year Of Release: 2007
Plot: Erica Bain survives a horrific attack by three thugs in a park which leaves her terribly injured and her fiancé dead. After she recovers from her physical injuries, she still can’t get overcome the mental trauma, to the point where she can’t sleep and can barely leave her apartment. However after an incident at a convenience store where she witnesses a crime and then kills the criminal after he comes after her, she discovers a sense of empowerment. Erica becomes a vigilante killer, as well as developing a complicated relationship with a police detective called Mercer. |
Today I just want to point out what a strange career Brave One director Neil Jordan has had. With most directors you see trends emerging, where they tend to stick to broadly similar genres and develop a style so that their films feel like they’ve been made by the same hand. For example Michael Bay movies are known for their giant explosions and OTT action, Steven Spielberg may have made many different types of films, but you see things like the Second World War coming back over and over again, as well, of course, for his penchant for effects filled blockbusters. When you see a Michael Bay or Steven Spielberg movie, you’re in little doubt who made the movie.
However Neil Jordan is almost the exact opposite. He’s a director who seems to have made a career out of making as many completely different types of movies as possible, which nearly all feel completely separate to one another. In fact it’s almost as if he’s gone out of his way to try and make as broad a range of films as humanly possible, which have spanned virtually every genre. Instead of genre and style being what marks out Jordan’s films as his, it’s particular themes that he’s fascinated with that pop up over and over again in his films, as if he’s trying to get at these things from as many angles as possible.
For example his very first film was Angel in 1982, which starred Stephen Rea as a saxophonist who witnesses the murder of his manager and a deaf-mute girl. He then sets off on a quest to find out why it happened and also avenge their deaths. Then, 25 years later he made The Brave One, where he comes back to the theme of vengeance and tries to attack it again. However they are vastly different feeling movies. Angel also saw his first exploration of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, which is the backdrop against which the film is set. As the director is Irish himself, this perhaps isn’t surprising, but it is interesting to see the angles he’s taken with it, which range from the unusual crime thriller, The Crying Game, to his historical epic, Michael Collins, to the trans-gendered comedy-drama, Breakfast On Pluto.
He’s also flirted with the supernatural numerous time, but in very different ways. He dealt with the symbolism of folklore in the wonderful horror movie, The Company Of Wolves is 1984, before going very Hollywood with Interview With The Vampire, and onto the peculiar In Dreams (which again flirts with the idea of revenge), where Annette Bening believes she’s having visions of her daughter’s killer and that she is linked to him in her dreams. In 1988 there was also the ghostly High Spirits, starring Steve Guttenberg, which is one of Jordan’s rare attempts at full on comedy. Again, they’re all supernatural, but each movie feels utterly different to the others.
Another thing he’s returned to several times but in very different ways is transvestism and transsexuals. There is of course the infamous scene in The Crying Game, where it’s revealed that Dil isn’t quite what you think she is (I’m half convinced that if it weren’t for that single scene, the film would have been largely ignored and Jordan wouldn’t have won the Best Screenplay Oscar). He returned to cross-dressers in In Dreams, where the killer, played by Robert Downey Jr, is a man dressed as a woman. Then in 2005 he made Breakfast On Pluto, where Cillian Murphy played a transgendered young woman who goes to London (the film again touched on the Northern Ireland troubles, with Kitten having run-ins with the IRA). Once more, each of those films is very different from the others, even while the same theme pops up repeatedly.
And then there are his movies that seem to have come completely out of left field. So, for example, he had great success in 1986 delving into the world of gangsters with Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa. In 1990 we had the peculiar prospect of Jordan directing a film scripted by David Mamet, with I’m No Angel. However while you might have expected those two to delve deep into crime and aggression, they made a comedy starring Robert De Niro and Sean Penn as two escaped jailbirds who get mistaken for priests (and yes, it is as strange as it sounds).
There’s also the small-scale portrait of teenage Irish life in 1991’s The Miracle (which is probably the closest film to his novels and short stories, that tend to deal with family and memories of childhood), the melodramatic 1940s romance of the Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes movie, The End Of The Affair, and the wonderful but very strange hyperbole of 1997’s The Butcher Boy. In fact, if he could just make a sci-fi film, he would pretty much have run the full gamut of genres, from the smallest low-budget character piece the most star-filled of Hollywood blockbuster-type movies.
It is a very strange career, but an absolutely fascinating one. While you expect directors to concentrate on films that may span a few different genres, but which have a similar feel and style, Neil Jordan has done it the other way round, instead looking at similar themes, but coming at them from a vast array of different angles.
One of the reasons it’s so unusual is that from a career perspective it’s very difficult to do what Jordan has done. Once a director has had success with a particular type of movie, they normally find it difficult to get other sorts of films funded, however Neil Jordan has managed it, largely because while some of his films have been more successful than others, he’s shown an impressive ability to shift between different types of films, and even when the results aren’t great, they’re always interesting.
Next up he’s got Ondine, which stars Colin Farell as an Irish fisherman who catches a woman in his net who he believes is a mermaid. Again it touches of the supernatural, fantastical themes of some of his earlier movies, but it once more feels like something very different to what he’s done before.
Jordan has said that, “The only reason I ever want to make movies is if there are characters that find bits of themselves that they didn't understand”, and it is perhaps this which explains why he’s shifted through so many different types of movies. He isn’t that interested in the genre or how he’s going to turn it into a noticeably ‘Neil Jordan’ movie. He just wants to tell the character’s story, in whatever is the best way to do that.
While he’s had a lot of success, Neil Jordan is perhaps not the ‘name’ director he ought to be, simply because with him, you literally never know what you’re going to get. However despite the unusual career trajectory, he is undoubtedly one of the most interesting directors working today.
TIM ISAAC
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