Blogorium Review: Harry Brown

Coming into Harry Brown, I had misgivings that the film was somewhat like Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, a comparison that popped up repeatedly during the film's brief release. The truth is that Harry Brown is much more Death Wish than Gran Torino; where Eastwood's film is more about stubbornness in the face of change, writer Gary Young and director Daniel Barber's film is akin to Charles Bronson's "this place has gone to hell and somebody has to stand up!" series. A few of the deleted scenes hint at a film more like Gran Torino (particularly a conversation between Brown and a priest after Len's funeral), but Harry Brown is an efficient, well made thriller that manages to add nuance to a normally black and white narrative.

Michael Caine is Harry Brown, an elderly soon-to-be widower living in a lower class estate (i.e. housing project) besieged by hooligans. Well, hooligans sounds less threatening (thanks in part to Bill Hicks' "there's no crime in England" bit on Arizona Bay), but these young drug runners / rabble rousers / violent gang members - introduced in the film by a cell phone video of initiation by crack pipe, followed by a drive by shooting of a young mother - are a menace to everyone living in the estate, so much so that Brown would rather walk around the neighborhood than pass through the pedestrian tunnel they inhabit.

When Brown's wife Kathy passes, he's left with his friend Leonard Atwell (David Bradley) and bartender Sid Rourke (Liam Cunningham) to keep him occupied, but Len's fear of abuse by the local gang ends tragically, and Harry Brown is left with nothing left but his training in the Marines and an overwhelming urge for justice. Circling his quest for revenge are D.I. Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer) and D.S. Terry Hickock (Charlie Creed-Miles), local police assigned to Leonard's murder.

Barber and Young find ways to deliver exposition in short, clear bursts, almost entirely with imagery: without saying a word, the film establishes that Harry and Kathy also had a daughter, that she died, and that her death coupled with Kathy's pushes Harry further into a hopeless state, one compounded by Len's ensuing death. Harry Brown is a film abut showing rather than telling, so when bits of exposition (like a story Harry tells to a dying arms dealer about war) appear, they feel organic rather than shoehorned into the plot. Harry's growing disdain for the police investigation compound his grief and bring out a man he "decided never to be again."

We meet the gang in an equally efficient series of police interviews, allowing us enough time to get some idea of who these kids are, what their place is in the gang, and hints at why they have such disdain for the authorities, all in less than ten minutes. I appreciated the fact that the kids in the estate have a good reason for not liking the ineffectual, arrogant local police: Frampton, a transfer to the homicide division, finds herself at odds with S.I. Childs (Iain Glen), a chief more concerned with good publicity and drug busts than working within his community.

When a raid late in the film turns violent, it's clear that police presence in their estate only incites the neighborhood kids to increase the hostility. At the same time, while their motive for hating authority is understandable, Barber and Young never let the central criminals - Noel (Ben Drew), Carl (Jamie Downey), and Marky (Jack O'Connell), and Dean (Lee Oakes) - off the hook for killing Leonard, even if it was in self-defense (as a cell phone video Marky shows Harry proves). Whether or not you agree with their behavior, they believe they have cause for it, creating an interesting struggle in perspective.

It's also important - and rare for this kind of film - to point out that Kathy isn't killed by the gang. Neither is their daughter, who probably died long before the criminals were born. Harry passively watches the kids break into a car and viciously beat its owner into the curb, and initially leaves out the critical detail about who the knife that killed Len belonged to, and his decision to turn violent is calculated, deliberate, and brutal following accidentally stabbing Dean after a drunken night at the pub.

One buys Harry Brown's transformation primarily because Caine straddles the line between old & frail and highly trained assassin with ease. Unlike Eastwood in Gran Torino, you don't initially believe that Harry Brown is a "guy you shouldn't fuck with"; he seems like an old man, just hanging on because he doesn't know how not to. At the same time, this is Michael Caine, and at all times one is aware that he can turn that switch and be the badass these punks can't deal with. And, of course, he does. If it helps, think of your reaction to Liam Neeson in Taken compared to watching the film unfold. Even Charles Bronson, who is supposed to be a "regular guy," still has a face chiseled out of stone in Death Wish. Credit to Michael Caine to believably shifting Harry Brown over the arc of the film.

The rest of the cast is comprised of familiar British faces from TV and cinema, including Mortimer (Elizabeth, Shutter Island, Redbelt), Creed-Miles (The Fifth Element, Nil by Mouth), Glen (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Doctor Who), Cunningham (Dog Soldiers, RKO 281), and particularly David Bradley, who most viewers will recognized as Filch, the eternally suspicious groundskeeper of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series. It's actually such a shift in character type that I'd daresay that Potter fans will be impressed to see Bradley play a nuanced role.

Harry Brown stumbles a little bit at the end: in an attempt to make the crime more "institutional" outside of the estate, an otherwise minor character is elevated at the eleventh hour to "criminal mastermind" in a way that, while hinted at throughout the film, never quite gels with the revenge narrative. While it is a distraction, I hesitate to say it derails an otherwise fine film, made with care and precision to keep audiences invested throughout. Harry Brown is certainly a breath of fresh air in a genre that appeared to have lost its edge.