(NOTE:  No spoilers beyond what reviews and trailers also reveal.)

Michael Caine has appeared in roughly 100 films, including a handful of classics such as Alfie and The Man Who Would Be King, as well as a slew of stinkers (which he cheerfully admits he did for the money) -- although even when the movie reeked, Caine couldn't be faulted for his performance (only his choice of roles).  About 20 years ago, he finally decided to leave off the stinkers and focus on quality films, thereby snagging himself a couple of Best Supporting Actor Oscars (for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules).  He’s made no secret of the fact that he longs for the big trophy, though, and it’s apparent that he’s been casting about for a lead role that can take him there. (He had a near miss in 2002 with The Quiet American, a quintessential Caine role that got him nominated.)

Some critics have pegged his latest role, as the title character in Harry Brown, as one of his best acting jobs yet, but watching the film yesterday, it struck me:  Wonderful as he is, Caine never really plays a character.  Like the generation of classic movie stars he grew up with, he is always indisputably “Michael Caine” on screen.  By the old definition, this lack of disappearance into character would classify him as a “star” rather than as an “actor” yet Caine is never considered anything less than the latter, because unlike many younger movie stars (Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts, I’m looking at you), he always loses himself in the emotions of the part.  

And that’s what I’ve decided that Caine plays:  emotions, not characters.  He’s never less than convincing in what he’s feeling on-screen, always taking us subtly and masterfully into his character’s emotional states and motivations, and thus making his actions credible and engaging. It’s almost impossible not to like Caine and root for him, even when he plays a rare villainous part (as in Mona Lisa).  And as he’s aged and chosen parts that play frankly on the themes of mortality and physical decline, our sympathies have only grown.

Enter Harry Brown, a British pensioner who loses his wife, the one who made a tidy oasis of their modest apartment in subsidized housing.  But just outside its thin walls lurks the evil world – aka London in full urban blight mode.  As in the U.S., the high-rise apartments optimistically built in the 1960’s to clean up and “modernize” living for the poor have become warrens of crime, covered in grime and graffiti and infested with junkies and criminals.  In this world, Harry is literally the Lone Ranger – not just the only decent person we ever encounter in his neighborhood, but an ex-Royal Marine who once served in Northern Ireland where he saw (and probably did) things he doesn’t want to talk about, not even to his only friend, Len, a fellow widower.  

It’s Len’s death, close on the heels of the loss of his wife (and reason for living) that spurs Harry into action that is both movie-predictable and yet, in Caine’s capable hands, completely believable. While attempting to confront the punks who’ve been tormenting him (even setting fire to his apartment), Len is beaten to death in the pedestrian tunnel that we've seen Harry pointedly avoid walking through. This simple concrete tunnel is a vision of urban hell, one that may cost you more than your life to enter – it may cost you your soul. (By movie’s end, we will wonder if it has cost Harry his.)

Harry Brown is like that tunnel – not to be entered into lightly. The film begins with a random drugged up thrill shooting of a mother wheeling a stroller, and this opening shot serves as fair warning of what’s to come. I’ve rarely seen a movie more dark and depressing.  No, not even The Road, which displaced its horrors onto a post-apocalyptic world that we can tell ourselves we’ll never live to see.  Harry Brown takes place in a present-day world that we know exists; those of us who live in urban areas have seen it up close many times. The Road conjured what might happen if we don’t mend our foolish ways, but Harry Brown pitilessly portrays how we have already fouled our nest, from the wretched consequences of heedless urban development to the neglect of education, social services and jobs for youth, who as a result become homicidal savages. We share Harry’s horror as he peeks from behind his high rise apartment’s curtains to the tunnel below, looking down on thefts, beatings and rapes as well as the drug deals that fuel them.

Just when you think the film couldn’t get any bleaker, it goes a step further.  Having become a vigilante to avenge his friend, Harry enters the squalid quarters of local drug dealers, in a scene that could serve as a précis of the stylistic differences between American vs. British films (gritty division). Not for director Daniel Barber the outlandish and glamorous drug lairs that Hollywood conjures, bristling with men wearing both clothes and guns to die for.  These criminals are filthy addicts you can almost smell on-screen, and their drug factory is a sinister yet mundane space, its menace lurking in the corners, from the breathing of blowers drying the marijuana plants to the greasy plastic curtains that Harry must walk through to the sickening homemade porn playing on the TV. A life of drugs, even a profitable one, has never looked less appealing (no, not even in Trainspotting).  

In this scene, as in all others, Caine’s performance also exists in the margins, showing us Harry’s reactions to what he’s witnessing only in micro-elements, just as he must manage what he shows to both the hooligans and the police that he’s trying to outsmart.  But then emotional caution is second nature to him – one heartbreaking scene shows him holding off sobbing for his dead friend until the exact moment the police leave his apartment and he can have his feelings in private. 

 Subtlety is also the byword of the action.  Harry is never a movie hero, one who suddenly springs from dotage into ninja-like dexterity. He fights as we believe an old but obviously robust man with deep military experience would. He doesn’t always hit his target, he stumbles, he makes mistakes, but he also knows how to use both weapons and watchfulness to his advantage.

In his journey, Harry has both ally and enemy in a police inspector (Emily Mortimer) who serves as a combination Inspector Javert and substitute daughter, worrying about his welfare even as she begins to suspect he’s responsible for a rash of convenient killings.  As the only morally unambiguous figure (and competent police officer) in the film, she’s a convenient cipher in plot terms.  But for the audience, she provides a safe place to stand, a welcome respite from the unremitting darkness.

Walking out of Harry Brown, I felt an existential crisis coming on such as few movies have ever evoked in me. It was a beautiful spring day but I exited to an urban street that had its own pulsating beat of pointless commercialism, grime and lurking degradation (nearby, a young man pushed his girlfriend up against the wall to question her).  I wondered what the point of living was in such a fallen world.  What keeps people going in a life like Harry Brown’s, in a neighborhood where there is seemingly no love, no peace and no hope?  

As if in answer, dialogue from another movie, Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, sprang to mind. Here the evil lurks not in urban decay, but in a bucolic 1940’s small town, into which drops Joseph Cotten’s misanthropic and misogynistic serial killer disguised as a charming uncle, seemingly on a harmless family visit. When his once-adoring teenage niece, Charlie, discovers his real identity, he discards his benevolent mask and horrifies her by describing how he sees the world:

“You live in a dream. You're a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it? Wake up, Charlie. Use your wits. Learn something.”

All too often movies are an escape from reality – most people say that’s precisely what they value them for.  I’ve always been fond of movies that face us squarely towards reality, no matter how difficult or dark, movies that make us feel something deeply.  I walked out of Harry Brown thinking, “Well, yes, but there can be too much of that" -- only to reconsider as the hours passed.  

In Michael Caine’s star-making and arguably still best role, Alfie, the movie’s title song plaintively asked, “What’s It All About, Alfie?”  In the week before he died, my father humorously quoted that line several times, a coded admission that even nearing death at age 84, he was still wondering what the meaning of life was. I’ve long felt I know the answer – it’s the love, stupid – but how best to enact that meaning still remains a question.  Harry Brown threw me back on myself, made me wonder what I’m doing with my life to give it meaning beyond surviving.  Yes, my form of survival looks far better in many ways than that of the characters in this movie, but at bottom, we all have to ask what meaning we are giving to life, as well as what meaning we are taking from it.  What will we have left behind in this world when we go?

And for reminding me of that all-important and endlessly uncomfortable question, I have to pay my respects to Harry Brown.