At least not yet.) One night, when she and her fiance David ( Lost's Naveen Andrews) are out walking their dog in Central Park, they are beset by a band of leering thugs, who brutally beat Erica into a coma and David into his grave, gleefully filming the whole thing. The Brave One, the Neil Jordan-directed vigilante flick of which she is the titular star, is a pious little scrap of sleaze, a film that pretends to furrow its brow thoughtfully over the vengeful violence in which it happily wallows.įoster plays Erica Bain, the voice behind an arty New York radio show called 'Streetwalk.' (No, no hookers involved. After those last two films, it was beginning to seem that Foster had become incapable of playing anything other than a Single Mother protecting a Helpless Child from Bad Men-a suspicion that her off-key performance as a Manhattan fixer in Inside Man did little to challenge.īut now Foster has followed her psychological arc to its predictable conclusion, from victim to protector to avenger, and the result is not pretty. The theme of victimhood, and specifically predation on women and children, has been a staple of her oeuvre, first in upscale genre films such as The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs and, more recently, in glossy dreck like Panic Room and Flightplan. What in the world is wrong with Jodie Foster? For years, arguably decades, her career has seemed haunted by her turn as Iris Steensma in Taxi Driver, as if the fictional experience of playing a pubescent prostitute had left real-life psychic scars.

Jodi foster in the brave one