THERE’S PROBABLY no such thing as a liberal, enlightened vigilante movie, but Harry Brown‘s harrowing surfaces and a sunset performance of dignity and smothered wrath by Michael Caine give this minor movie a deeper mood than you would expect.
The film is easily synopsized as a raging-geezer drama, and it’s not the first of its kind. Charles Bronson was making Death Wish sequels up into an age when he closely resembled children’s TV host Captain Kangaroo. Gran Torino proved that fans still wanted to see Eastwood preserving the integrity of his lawn at an age when he ought to be paying other people to mow it.
We’ve seen this movie before but rarely done this crazy. Where Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank showed the red flow of life in a dump of a British housing estate, Harry Brown‘s location is pure mahogany-tinged death. The weirdos he encounters seem like actors in a prequel to A Clockwork Orange. The visual cues resemble Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. A stage for the action is a pedestrian underpass under the street that no one seems to be able to avoid. These horror-story people-coops in England are called “sink estates”—the tunnel leading out is the open plughole.
Caine’s Harry Brown is a cautious, ill old Londoner with little left to lose. He has a mate, named Leonard (David Bradley, your go-to actor when you need an undertaker), whom he meets at the grim local pub. Both are harassed by the thugs on the estate. Leonard is aware of Harry’s past as a Royal Marine; when things get worse, Len asks Harry if he ever killed a man during his service.
The quiet way Caine phrases the reply, “You can’t ask me that, Len,” gives us everything Caine ever had in his prime: the decency and the steel beneath it. Maddened by the way the idle kids go at him, Len hides a bayonet under his sweater before he takes a walk. And that’s the last of him. A female constable (Emily Mortimer) brings Harry the news of Len’s murder. That’s when Harry goes out to buy a pistol.
The underground gun merchant’s shack looks as if the Bobby Sands of Hunger had redecorated the walls with his own homemade pigments. The host, Stretch (Sean Harris), is a freakish stripling with wavy scars all over his torso; he tends a park-size marijuana plantation concealed behind black trash bags. When not freebasing from the barrel of his pistol, he’s taping some amateur porno. It’s going to turn into a snuff film if the star is not untied from the couch soon and taken to the hospital. (“She likes to cuddle, this one.”)
Watching Caine slowly decide what needs to be done, and conquering the fear and the disgust before he does it, makes one happy—happy as watching Noomi Repace’s Lisbeth watch the Land Rover burn in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. At such moments, a movie does the thinking for you, which is why vigilante tales always succeed. But the Dumpster-eye view gets violated when a bit of borrowed dialogue sticks out like a sore thumb: Stretch describes the effect of one gun he’s selling as “a brick through a plate-glass window,” which is the exact phrase Q used when he convinced 007 to upgrade his pistol in Dr. No.
Harry Brown isn’t dead from the neck up. Director Daniel Barber disguises the manipulation in the film as best he can. He finds pity in the story, with Mortimer, as always, a well of sympathy. The cops are otherwise inept, especially Iain Glen as a fatuous chief launching something called “Operation Blue Jay” and instead starting what looks like an urban insurrection in the housing complex. The quieter this film gets, the better it is, as in the speech when Brown finally decides to talk about his war. Caine’s acting shows you the cool side of slow.
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
Harry Brown
Opens April 30 @ Camera 7
in Campbell, Santana Row in San Jose and Cinema 16 Mountain View R; 102 min.
Directed by Daniel Barber and starring Michael Caine
