07-01-10 Movie Review: Harry Brown

Jim Erickson says the new Michael Caine movie is in many ways a standard genre type of film, but the treatment makes it all seem new. There’s not a lot going on noncommercial-wise over the 4th of July weekend, so all I have to offer this morning is the Tallgrass Al Fresco offering tonight of the original 1932 Warner Brothers gangster classic Scarface, with Paul Muni playing a character modeled on Al Capone and George Raft establishing himself as a gangster star in the movie some people credit with starting the classic crime series of the thirties. Scarface, not to be confused with the later Al Pacino version, shows at 8pm in the Brickyard at 129 North Rock Island, tonight, preceded by a Tallgrass short subject; and next Wednesday at 6:30, the Murdock Theatre at 536 North Broadway shows Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin at 6:30, on the big screen with subtitles.

But we do have a rare grownup crime thriller, and quite an unusual one, in Harry Brown, with Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer.

Basically, Harry Brown is just a standard vigilante revenge movie, very similar to Charles Bronson’s Death Wish series of 1974 through '94, but made very different by its hero and its treatment. Caine plays a very aging veteran of Marine Corps combat, with some of the degeneration of age: he does not stand very straight or walk very fast and in general has little resemblance to Clint Eastwood, though he can be formidable for brief moments when there is no alternative. For no clear reason except genre conventions, he has only one friend; maybe if I lived in a London slum housing unit I would understand that. And for no good reason except stereotype, we see a picture of him in the old days with chestful of decorations. Also generically, he is given a personal motive for his one-man campaign to wipe out the scummy youth gang that has poisoned his deteriorating neighborhood, but he never does anything beyond his waning strength.

While we’re at the stereotypical elements, let’s just mention the unhelpful police, the false friend who is behind it all, the sympathetic woman, and entirely too many nick-of-time bullets from offscreen and villains who can’t shoot straight. But the treatment makes all this old stuff work as if it were new.

Long-held shots, long pauses in conversations, spare movement with shots, and inadequate lighting contribute to a feeling of helplessness and melancholy, sustained by suspense promoted by the physical condition of Caine and the corruption of the neighborhood, which is such that at one point I decided that no success of any significance was even possible for Caine. There are a number of interesting ironies. The stubborn misinterpretation of the situation by the head cop ends up accomplishing more than Caine does to clean up the area, and of the two major police characters, only one suspects what Caine is doing but neither seems much interested in bringing him to justice.

Emily Mortimer in unconvincingly miscast as a policewoman, but what do I know about police people? The gang’s opium den is so stereotypically evil that it reminded me of the Yellow Peril pulp material of thirties, but what do I know about opium dens in London? I doubt that anybody could recover from some of the kickings-when-down, but maybe people are tougher than I think. I do have dubious feelings about pro-vigilante movies as Harry Brown, but it’s a popular genre and Harry Brown is a superior example of a kind of movie I don’t often recommend.