rupaabdi

'The Brave One' is one of those few Hollywood movies which has a well thought out script that brilliantly draws parallels between the dark side of human psyche and the underbelly of a metropolis.

I've watched this movie several times and every time I could derive a little more strength and inspiration from it. Not the kind of strength that you need to exact revenge for the wrongs done to you, but the strength that you need to survive any kind of trauma or abuse. The movie also portrays the darker side of the victims of brutality when they chose revenge as their only path to survival. The movie has a taut story line and superb piece of acting by Joddie Foster and Terrence Howard (Detective Mercer), who is, by the way, one of the most underrated actors of Hollywood. The highlight of the film is its script which both touches and leaves you jolted. The script writing trio: Roderick and Bruce Taylor and Cynthia Mort skillfully transform their narration of New York , from city which is benign and filled with nostalgia for its old world charm, to a dark place where fear lurks in the shadows.. The way Erica Bains describes the city to her listeners before and after her tragedy is one of the finest pieces of narration that I have come across in a Hollywood film. It reminded me of an essay written by Cynthia Ozick on the changing faces of New York, titled 'The Synthetic Sublime' published in the year 2000 in a collection called 'The Best American Essays' printed by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, USA.

This movie is based on a novel of the same name by Bakim Chandra Chaterjee. This novel was penned a century after the events actually happened. Notwithstanding its literary significance, the novel has overtones of Hindu revivalism and attitude of co-existence with the British rule which is a major departure from the actual incidents of this movement. There are official records documented by British officers of at least three incidents where the Muslims and Hindus together fought against the East India Company. The actually rebellion, on which this movie is based, was a united Hindu-Muslim revolt against the British known as the Fakir Sanyasi Rebellion which engulfed most districts of northern and eastern undivided Bengal during the early part of the British colonial rule in India (1767-1800). This rebellion was led by a Muslim Fakir, Majnu Shah and a Hindu Sanyasi, Bhawani Pathak, a fact that is totally ignored in this movie.