IT'S HARRY BROWN, a 2009 British action film that came and went without much notice. It stars . . .
. . . Michael Caine.
Harry Brown is an senior-citizen vigilante movie in the tradition of Death Wish and Gran Torino -- far better than the first, about equal to the second, which was quite excellent.
Wikipedia does a good job summarizing the plot.
A reason to see Harry Brown, besides good acting and a serious examination of the moral questions raised by torture and vigilantism, are scenes near the end. London police try to arrest drug dealers and killers in the public housing estate, as the Brits call it, where the protagonist lives.
The resulting mob violence is horrifying. More horrifying still is that it looks very much videos of the real mob violence that recently exploded across Britain.
Harry Brown is, in this, prophetic. The film explores the the natural consequences of a culture filled with unsocialized young men and a police force disconnected from the reality of daily life on the streets.
All across Europe, film artists are doing a good, though underappreciated, job of exposing the social, political, moral, and cultural rot and corruption at the heart of their eurosocialist paradises.
The Girl franchise probably belongs at the top of this list: The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest -- in that order or not at all.
These films are hard to take and are not for the squeamish -- as, indeed, Harry Brown is not for the squeamish.
(And I will say in passing, I wish I were still squeamish. I wish my own tolerance for shock, my immunity to the turned stomach, had not been washed away by decades of viewing movies about physical and emotional violence. Innocence can be lost only one, and mine is long gone. The early loss of innocence by our children today is a major cause of the rot in our popular culture. Each offering has to be more shocking than the last.)
The Girl movies are not about mob violence but about evil at the heart of Swedish government and culture. The irony is The Girl books and the movie come from a leftist novelist and leftist filmmakers. The male hero is a muckraking leftist journalist. The female hero, a symbolic figure who represents modern Sweden, is scarred physically (with tattoos and piercings) and psychologically (by a lifetime of abuse by evil individuals and institutions they control).
The filmmakers may think they're indicting the system. What they're really indicting is Sweden itself, the socialist paradise their ideological ancestors created. But it is no utopia. It is a dark, unhappy, decadent place. People couple, but without commitment or love. For children, families are often places of danger, not security. Men in power -- and they are all men -- cannot be trusted, and institutions are rotten with corruption. God is nowhere to be seen. The main characters fight back with the power of the press and the law, but redemption -- such as it is -- comes only through incredible and horrific acts of violence. Evil men are killed, but the spirit at the end is a spirit of utter exhaustion.
Harry Brownis much the same, though the setting is more narrowly drawn around a small community that has been abandoned to violent, feral drug dealers. The neighborhood is a no-go zone for women, children, old people, and the police. When their hegemony is threatened, the drug dealers fight back. But the truly alarming this is that they are joined -- so far as we can see -- by all the young people on the streets. The mob is vicious, destructive, almost organic, and it quickly overpowers the police.
Harry Brown also has something profound, but sad, to say about the death of religion in England. When Harry's elderly friend is killed, his Christian funeral has excatly one body, one officiant, and one mourner. Later Harry enters a church. It is, naturally, quite empty. He has recently stumbled across a wad of drug money. He shoves these millions, probably, into the offering box. Though there is no evidence in the movie that Harry is a believer, he knows instinctively that the true enemy of the evil in the youth culture is the church of Jesus Christ.
More needs to be written about the prescience of our artists in prophesying the violence naturally associated with the decadence of our civilization. What of A Clockwork Orange? What of Straw Dogs? Of Dirty Harry?
Whatever we may wish to say about these things, we cannot honestly profess shock when the violence in our culture begins to mimick the prophetic violence on our screens. Not after our culture has decoupled love and marriage, marriage and children, and children and the standards and virtues of Western Civilization.
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