HARRY BROWN directed by DANIEL BARBER
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But Harry Brown is no superspy: he’s a pensioner living in a hellish London council estate ravaged by drugs and crime, the sort of place where old people creep along the margins, praying that no one will notice them. After his wife dies and his best friend is murdered by drug-dealing punks, Harry turns vigilante, rediscovering the violence of his early years as a British soldier in Northern Ireland. Caine is magnificent in the role, but Harry Brown pulled me in two different directions: though the early scenes poignantly capture an elderly person’s pain as loved ones disappear, the revenge story is a little too pat, hitting all the requisite notes about the broken justice system in its buildup to the cathartic bloodletting. Like most vigilante dramas, Harry Brown is comforting but might make you question your need for comfort.
Harry turns to violence only when he’s got nothing left to lose, and watching him get to that point is a wrenching experience. In the hospital, he speaks to his unconscious wife and tenderly strokes her face, but later, playing chess in the local pub with his old friend Leonard (David Bradley), he confides that she no longer seems to know he’s there. A telephone call in the middle of the night summons him back to the hospital, and in the pouring rain he’s scared away from the shortcut again. When he arrives belatedly to find his wife’s bed already stripped down to the mattress, he bursts into tears. In the cemetery, a headstone beside his wife’s reveals that the couple had a daughter who died in her teens. But Harry’s loss cuts deepest in a later scene where he returns home after having impulsively killed a mugger; lying in bed, he passes a hand over his wife’s pillow, but there’s no one to share his turmoil.
Sitting in the theater, you’re liable to buy all this simply for the pleasure of watching Caine work. Like Eastwood and other actors of his vintage, Caine brings to the project not only his own formidable skills but more than half a century of movie history. Despite the rather routine social politics of Harry Brown, the movie ends with a haunting and ambiguous image of Harry strolling down the asphalt to the darkened mouth of the pedestrian walkway. Thanks partly to him, it’s now a safe passage for the people of the council estate. But as he nears the darkness, it also unmistakably suggests an open grave.
