Though I’ve really loved a few of Neil Jordan’s movies – The End of the Affair in particular, Interview with the Vampire of course … looking at his filmography now I realise I’ve actually missed quite a few, lol – I really came to this expecting nothing more than the latest perfect Jodie Foster performance. This used to be an event, of course, in the decade leading up to Panic Room a Jodie movie was really a Jodie Movie. Now, she almost religiously gets Oscar buzz on a yearly basis (no luck yet), and like Dakota Fanning, Johnny Depp – I’m sure there are others – more often than not, the greatness of the performance is almost “boringly” so.

But this performance honestly surprised me. Foster is known for playing strong women, of course, and her roles have almost without exception always had something powerful to say about women, about the treatment, the history, the everything of women. It’s almost bizarre to find her in this movie once you find out what kind of movie it is. I read recently about how upset she’d been by Sin City and I totally got where she was coming from, but there are many ways in which The Brave One is not so different from that comic book burst of ultraviolence. What makes Foster’s performance so surprising is the weakness she manages to show us at times. It’s a revenge movie, so of course there’s still a lot of strength. It’s called The Brave One, d’uh. But it’s the other, quieter stuff – the way she approaches the police desk after first getting the courage to leave her apartment at the start, for instance – that really made an impression on me.

There are moments here where I had to actually double check that it wasn’t based on a graphic novel or comic, in fact – the moment, for instance, where her “voiceover” first creeps in as she leaves the subway, “Why aren’t my hands shaking? Why does nobody stop me?” It practically reminded me of an old Incredible Hulk cartoon I used to watch on a loop, “Dizzy, shaky. Unable … to … stand …” It’s almost like she’s literally transforming superhero style into this other person she is in the end (“Superc*nt” – no don’t close the window, that’s the movie’s word, not mine – would almost be the perfect title, in fact). But though I’d struggle to say the movie is necessarily dark – on the contrary, it revels in its near-schlockiness just about wherever it possibly can – it’s certainly more interested in showing how affected – and, ultimately, irredeemably destroyed – Foster’s character is by every act of violence. And that’s the giant hairline than separates it from the far less reverent Sin City.

Anyway, like I said, I was amazed to find it really wasn’t just the Jodie that thrilled me in this movie. It’s every bit as absorbingly intense emotionally as I found The End of the Affair. It’s one of those movies that just fired its harpoon of interest directly into the center of my forehead and never let me go. At almost 2 hours in length, that’s really no mean feat. There’s just so much here that can only improve on subsequent viewings. There are so many things that really shouldn’t work, so many conveniences and contrivances – quite literally, the shooting in the convenience store, then the trust Foster shows following a stranger into a back alley to get a gun – but they’re all smoothed over effortlessly by what I can only assume is a Disbelief Suspension Device that Jodie Foster has concealed somewhere on her person at all times on set.

My mum said afterwards how Foster looks much as she did in The Accused. I said, yeh, and I’m sure that’s how a lot of people, possibly even Jodie, hoped that movie would end. It’s basically that movie meets Taxi Driver, Iris all grown up and doing the Travis Bickle thing – with the prostitute in the taxi, it’s almost a direct lift. It honestly amazes me that I haven’t heard more people going crazy about how basically dangerous this movie is etc, like Daily Mail types who said David Cronenberg’s Crash was gonna bring down society etc. This in itself probably says more than the movie itself does about how much morals have crumbled in just a decade. Even I found myself during this movie, even as I was quietly cheering Jodie on, thinking, “but … dude!” But what finally made me love this movie the most is how it genuinely takes no prisoners. It goes all the way, right or wrong. It delivers, which is more than can be said of at least 80% of the movies I’ve seen this year.

I’ll admit I was slightly bored by the American Girl series by the time I got around to this one, but while Samantha remains my fave (till Kit Kittredge next year, at least), this is probably technically the best of them to date. Maya Ritter, who plays Molly, is 10 times as natural as AnnaSophia Robb was in the first (I didn’t update my review there, but the one thing I would’ve added is how incredible it is how Robb’s acting has improved since that debut – she’s pretty bad there, though no less cute), and even Molly Ringwald is good as her mother. More interesting to me was the Emily Bennett character – I found her even more interesting than Molly. I was about to ask there, where’s the movie, doll and book about her? But of course Google has the answer, and the last two of those do at least exist I just found the whole “Christmas Carol” thing too sweet. Like, I knew it was coming at the end but it still totally overwhelmed me. Tory Green is great as Emily, anyway – she’s Australian, apparently which would explain her slightly OTT British accent … but if OTT British accents are okay anywhere it’s surely here. These are definitely gonna be an annual Christmas thing for me, I think … I hadn’t actually realised till today that all of them take the same round-the-seasons structure (though I’m assuming that Kit being released in June won’t be the same?). Very cute

It struck me while watching Samantha again in preparation for the other two parts in this series … these movies are so the kind of movies – or the books they’re based on, at least – you imagine Lisa Simpson to be awed by, lol. This one ups the whole feminist side of these stories quite a bit, in the etiquette classes Felicity takes, summed up in a great line from the tutor, that she’s preparing them “to take your places in society”.

I originally watched the first American Girl movie ‘cos of AnnaSophia Robb, but it was good enough overall for me to keep an eye out for the other ones. There’s something about these movies, though they’re by no means classics of any kind, that feels right. To just take the same type of character, to bottle up a chunk of history in a way that will subtly raise interest,in young girls in particular, without preaching too much and at all times really just telling a cute and happy story. This one features a lot of one of my favourite combinations in movies – girls and horses. It might not ever reach Velvet or Dreamer levels of wonderment, but it held my attention and I’m sure some girls will go nuts over it.