Meeting violence with violence

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Harry Brown (Michael Caine) lives on an estate racked by violence and fear. Each time he steps out of his front door or peers nervously through his curtains he witnesses another act of brutality carried out by a gang on the estate. This is a situation repeated, tragically, in a number of inner-city communities in Britain today, and high-profile cases like that of Rhys Jones (a young boy killed when he was caught in the crossfire of suspected gang fighting in 2007) have brought the issue to public attention. Harry Brown brings us face-to-face with the deadly combination of drugs and guns that terrorises the residents of estates across Britain, and, for that matter, Europe and the United States. Here the Police sometimes refuse to intervene at all, and at other times they exacerbate an already volatile situation. Who will challenge the gang's rule of violence on the estate?

Harry Brown is the first feature-length film to be directed by Daniel Barber. It was filmed on location in Elephant and Castle, the estate on which Michael Caine grew up, and features both actors and actual residents. Harry Brown is intended to make its audiences take notice, and, as Barber comments, question why the issue isn't being discussed in public.

The residents are helpless against the threat of the gang, particularly at night when the gang rules the lawless estate. Teenagers exchange drugs openly, steal from cars and beat off anyone who stands in their way. After one car theft, in which the owner is injured trying to intervene, we hear his wife pleading for anyone to help. No one comes.

The film centres on the life of one elderly resident, Harry Brown. A former Royal Marine and veteran of the Northern Ireland conflict, he now lives in fear of the gang and ignores blatant drug dealing to stay out of trouble. But he is continually inconvenienced by the gang's control of the pedestrian subway, and he doesn't reach the hospital in time to be with his wife in the final moments before her death. His friend Len (David Bradley) takes matters into his own hands, having been the subject of ceaseless harassment from the gang. He has a WWII bayonet that he intends to use to confront them. Harry urges him to go to the police, but Len's cynicism is obvious. The authorities can make no difference; the men are helpless.

The next day, Harry learns that his friend has been killed. He has been found stabbed to death in the pedestrian subway. When D.I. Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer) and D.S. Terry Hicock (Charlie Creed-Miles) visit Harry to inform him, we see the contrasts in the police’s response to the estate's violence. Frampton's concern for Harry is clear, but Hicock's attitude is less caring. He doesn’t think those living on the estate are worthy of his attention, and cannot understand why Frampton would have transferred from the much more comfortable fraud investigation squad. Their attitudes to Harry's position differ as well. For Hicock, Harry is simply another elderly man on an unimportant estate, but Frampton is saddened by his position. The residents aren’t used to concern from police officers, howover. When she offers Harry help with his grief, he responds, ‘I don't need anybody.’ He begins to weep as he says the words, but this phrase captures Harry's attitude for the rest of the film: he doesn't need anybody to help him.

The lines of right and wrong are blurred from this point on. The police question several gang members about Len's murder. They respond with a terse, ‘No comment’, and are quick to point out how unjust it is for the police to assume they’re involved: where are the police when they're in trouble? The atmosphere of suspicion towards the police may well be what has hardened Hicock to the estate's residents, but the gang's mistrust of the police seems so deeply ingrained that we wonder whether Frampton's good intentions will ever make a difference. Even Harry, as we see, prefers to mete out his own version of justice on the gangs. Even so, Harry Brown is no indictment of the motives of officers like Frampton. Rather, it's a critique of the way the police as a whole deal with the gangs, which is portrayed here as at best inconsistent and at worse unjust.

This impression is reinforced when Frampton next visits Harry. She informs him that they found Len with a bayonet, and that the charge could be reduced to manslaughter. When Harry visits Len's flat, he finds it's been vandalised, with much of it burned and graffiti tags adorning the walls. It's an important illustration of Harry's helplessness and isolation. When he stumbles from a pub drunk and turns a mugger's knife back against him, Harry makes the connection: it's time he took on the gangs himself.

What follows uncovers the real and terrible lawlessness of the estate. Gangs rule their territories, terrorising ordinary people on a whim. As Harry begins his mission, he peels away the first layer of the crime world, seeking to buy a gun. It's staggeringly easy for Harry to do so; all he has to do is choose a firearm and pay his money. The ready availability of drugs and guns, as shown in Harry Brown, is characteristic of the gang violence on the estate: blunted to their actions by drugs, with ready access to weapons.

Caine met the young people currently living on the estate during filming, and recalls their desire to escape their situation. ‘They all wanted to have a chance’, he says, ‘and it wasn’t there.’ They see no opportunity to better themselves. Harry Brown doesn't focus a great deal on the causes of the situation on the estate, showing the results instead. The feeling of helplessness described by Caine is represented in a different way in the film. Here it's boredom. Harry contrasts the violence of the sectarian activists in Northern Ireland with that of the gangs. ‘Those people were fighting for something; for a cause. To them out there, this is just entertainment’, he says. His diagnosis is astute. He doesn't believe that the gang members are irredeemably criminal, but that their frustration and lack of opportunity has driven them to their position. They're fighting against a system that they do not trust and that they perceive has failed them. Their situation gives them little hope for the future or of securing a job to help their position. They also feel a sense of injustice over their treatment by the authorities. The figures they have turned to in their own communities have often, like Sid (the pub landlord), led them further into crime.

Harry's solution to the violence is to meet it with greater violence. The implication of the film's ending is that his actions were a legitimate way to counter the efforts of the gangs. The police's efforts, after all, only inflame the chaos. The authorities have failed Harry, as well as the gangs. Director Daniel Barber proposes that the solution is in the community, but not in more actions like Harry's. Instead, he argues that we need to pay attention to young people in our society, to face up to the reality of drugs and violence that exists on many streets in Britain. Not every estate is like the one portrayed here, but some certainly are. Why do these young people lack hope? Why do they not believe there are opportunities for change?

We only need to ask the young people themselves. Many are well aware of the root of the problem, and they are begging for help. Commenting on a review of the film on the Time Out website, Dan writes, ‘I used to be part of this culture and spent three years in prison for knife crimes. If anyone comes on here [this comments area] and slates someone that's Trying [sic] to improve themselves is an idiot because that's why a lot of kids don't try, because people hold stereotypes about them being stupid.’[1] The insightfulness of his comment defies anyone to think he is stupid. None of our young people should believe that society thinks they are stupid, and we can all make a difference to the self-esteem of our young people. If you attend a church, why not find out what it is doing to engage with young people, and join in? If you are not a Christian, you could volunteer with the Youth Justice Board, spending time with young people convicted of crimes like those shown in Harry Brown. At the same time, the Bible tells us that our relationships and communities will not be made perfect until Jesus returns, and re-creates the earth without sin, where our hearts are no longer against God's rule in our lives. This is the picture of peace and good community set out at the end of the Bible, in a vision of this new earth: ‘God’s home is now among his people! . . . He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever’ (Revelation 21:3-4). If that promise fills you with hope, turn to Jesus, for he alone can deliver it.

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