Near the beginning of English director Daniel Barber's Harry Brown, a woman pushing a baby stroller is first terrorized, then shot dead, by a couple of cracked-out teenagers whizzing around on a too-small bicycle, like insane circus clowns out of your worst nightmare. We don't see who these kids are, but in the film's opening -- a snippet of grainy footage that looks to have been shot with a cell phone -- we see a brood of hooligans crunched together in small, enclosed space, getting high and brandishing weapons that we can't get a clear look at. This is just the beginning of the pileup of horrors Barber has in store for us as he spins out his aggressively sordid story of fear and ineffectual police protection in a South London council estate, and it's not for the faint of heart. There's just one problem: Stay away, and you'll miss Michael Caine.
Caine plays the Harry Brown of the title, a pensioner living in that council estate. (The picture was shot in and around South London's Elephant and Castle district; Caine himself grew up in the area.) Harry's wife has just died after what we can surmise was a long hospitalization; years earlier, he'd buried a daughter. Next, his best friend on the estate, Leonard (David Bradley), the guy he plays chess with down at the pub, becomes a victim of the estate's lawless teenage thugs, who hold their drug-addled war councils in a graffiti-sprayed underground passageway that the fearful residents have learned to avoid.
Harry may seem like a meek, slow-moving chess player, but he used to be a Marine (we'll later learn that he spent time "keeping the peace" in Northern Ireland). And when he realizes that the crisp, buttoned-up detective (played by Emily Mortimer) who comes to the estate to investigate Leonard's murder has only a feeble grasp of the anxiety and intimidation he and his neighbors face every day, he takes action himself, though he's not particularly happy about it.
Harry Brown is an aggressively violent and unsavory picture. I say that not to downplay the problem of urban violence in the United Kingdom (by all accounts, the problem is serious), but to point out that Barber doesn't know how to use brutal violence for maximum effect -- he seems to believe that if you just put it up there on-screen, it will speak for itself. Barber is clearly trying to make a straight-up social-problems picture -- there's nothing stylish or stylized about the violence in Harry Brown, and it's not presented for the audience's delectation. Even so, Barber, working from a script by Gary Young, works hard to make sure we get that he's dealing with really gritty stuff: The movie features two carelessly tattooed crackhead gun dealers, enterprising lads who also have a sideline in pornography featuring out-of-it, doped-up, presumably underage girls -- plus, they grow their own weed. These guys make the worst low-lifes in Trainspotting look like the Dead End Kids, and Barber wallows a bit too gleefully in their depravity. The sequence in which Harry, seemingly innocently, infiltrates their lair is extremely tense, but it also feels like a cheat, as if Barber felt the need to exaggerate the worthlessness of these scumbags to justify what Harry has to do. The movie is as hepped-up as they are, and true criminal viciousness doesn't require the extra hype.
Barber also conveniently downplays any public response, on the part of law officials or average citizens, to the murder of that young mother. She's addressed only as a news report; her murder may have been an effective way to open the story, but the movie never mentions her again -- she's just a convenient device. No matter how much this particular council estate may resemble a lawless town, it's hard to believe a mother murdered in front of her child wouldn't stir more of a public outcry.
The conundrum of Harry Brown is that Caine's performance makes it all worthwhile. Unconsciously, I'm sure, he undercuts the well-intentioned clumsiness of Barber's direction. Caine's Harry Brown is a reluctant vigilante: In an early scene, Leonard confesses how much he fears the neighborhood thugs and reveals the army-regulation weapon -- apparently a bayonet -- he's begun carrying. Harry urges him not to use it, and to speak to the police instead; later, he realizes that what seemed like wise counsel at the time was actually extremely unwise.
But Caine doesn't give us a dramatic breaking point, a big moment where we can see him deciding that he just can't take it any more. What's astonishing about this performance isn't that it's cozy or humane or reasoned; it's Caine's coldness that rings out here. I've heard people compare Harry Brown with another fairly recent old-codger vigilante movie, Gran Torino, and while I greatly enjoyed Eastwood's cranky, go-for-broke vitality in that picture (and respect him for recognizing that white people aren't the only people in the universe), Caine's performance goes further and runs much deeper.
There's been lots of ink, and plenty of pixels, spent on the lack of good roles for what we so euphemistically call aging actresses. But male actors don't have it much easier. And if you're Michael Caine -- Sir Michael Caine -- your problems may be trickier. You can always play Alfred in a Batman movie (and do it wonderfully). But beyond that, do you really want to settle for lovable duffer roles?
Those of us who love Michael Caine have to recognize that his capacity for coldness is part of what makes him great. And in that respect, what he does in Harry Brown is something of a bookend to his extraordinary, and extraordinarily chilly, turn in Mike Hodges' cold-blooded 1971 Get Carter, in which Caine plays a gangster first unraveling the mystery of his brother's gruesome death and then avenging it. I watched Get Carter again recently, and once again marveled at the fact that I can see nothing and everything in Caine's eyes: I still don't know quite what to make of the moment in which he puts a wad of bills in his teenaged niece's hands with the words "Be good. Don't trust boys," and turns to walk away from her, his eyes filled with blankness. There's protectiveness in his heart, but he'll be damned if he shows it.
Harry Brown is a very different character -- we're clued in, very early on, to his innate warmth and humanity, when he kisses the hand of his unconscious wife as she lies in her hospital bed. Later, when he corners the evil drug dealer he's already wounded, and fills in the grim details of how the thug is going to die, his face shows none of that warmth. Just before finishing the task at hand, he refers directly to the young girl the creep has been keeping in his den, who's just been overdosed with heroin. "You should have called an ambulance" -- he says, right before adding the famous Michael Caine pause -- "for the girl."
As he says those words, the decency in his heart is nowhere to be seen on his face, yet we know it's there. How does Caine do that? What he does in Harry Brown is more unsettling than it is exhilarating; he isn't working for kicks here, but for keeps. For Caine, the risk of becoming a beloved international treasure is high. He refuses that honor, for now.