Seen in retrospect, Johnny Depp’s The
Brave (made when the actor was just about at his peak of coolness, preceding the
commercial highs to come and the subsequent reputational collapse) seems suffused
by a desire to withdraw – into silence (there’s little dialogue, and none at
all for the first ten minutes or so), into myth and beyond. The film is set around
a hand-to-mouth melting-pot community, the landscape dominated by mounds of
garbage and shimmering heatscapes, which suddenly yield to something
quasi-Lynchian as Depp’s unemployed and luckless Raphael, following on a tip he
received in a bar, enters a strange building to ask about a job, descending
into a symbolic hell in which he’s eventually offered $50,000 to extinguish
himself in a snuff film in a week's time. Taking the offer and a cash advance on the basis of
stunningly little negotiation, Raphael conspicuously spreads the money around,
attracting various kinds of suspicion; at the end of the week, he’s strengthened
his core spiritual bonds, while putting himself beyond redemption in other
ways. The film resists the audience’s most likely expectations, whether for
some kind of last-minute escape or for any depiction of what Raphael must finally endure; with
his business with the world as we know it concluded, it leaves his final hell
to him and his acquirers. Depp has an intriguing if patchy feeling for
eccentricity, although it’s a rather distant viewing experience, even allowing
that this is inherent to what’s intended. The film has at least one major see-it-if-you-can
aspect, the casting of a long-haired Marlon Brando in one of his last roles,
extending the fateful offer from a wheelchair, in between musing on pain as a virtuous
end to life and blowing on a harmonica, a performance no doubt “phoned in” by some
measures, and yet embodying Brando’s unmatched capacity to transform whatever
cinematic space he (however peculiarly) chose to occupy.
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