Movie Review: Brothers

Brothers, like the fractured psyche of its combat soldier protagonist played by Tobey Maguire, gets it more than right while penetrating the tragic fallout from post-traumatic stress disorder, but shatters and loses its way while conceptualizing contrived war zones far away. Brothers stars Tobey Maguire as Sam Cahill, a decorated marine. Sam obediently followed in the footsteps of his stern marine vet father, Hank (Sam Shepard), while his younger brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) has embraced more rebellious tendencies. Tommy, who despises war, has just been released from prison where he spent time for an attempted bank robbery.

When the family gathers for a tense farewell dinner where Sam’s devoted wife Grace (Natalie Portman)and two small daughters Isabelle (Bailee Madison) and Maggie (Taylor Geare) prepare for his departure for Afghanistan, Tommy is invited to join them as an unwelcome guest. The gathering quickly escalates from awkward to confrontational, as Hank makes little effort to conceal his contempt for a wayward son returning home, and his favored child heading off into harm’s way.

With Sam overseas, the movie breaks in half, then falls apart. Sam’s helicopter is shot down, and he is presumed dead. The family holds a funeral, and his wife and girls begin to move on, with a sober and sobered Tommy subbing, unconvincingly, as a husbandly and fatherly surrogate. He gets some buddies to renovate his brother’s kitchen and provides Grace and the girls with a man around the house. Only barely is there a sexual spark. But that’s plenty to drive the mania of the movie’s second half.

As it happens, Sam is very much alive, a hostage of aggrieved, camcorder-wielding Afghan fighters. While he and a private (Patrick Flueger) are subjected to mind-bending terror in Afghanistan, we’re being tortured here at home. Every time, the film cuts from the devastated look on Maguire’s face to a scene of Gyllenhaal frolicking with the two girls or getting high with Portman, it’s like being splashed with frigid water.

“Brothers’’ is a remake of a 2004 Danish drama, directed and co-written by Susanne Bier and also about a soldier in Afghanistan and his ne’er-do-well brother. The movie was remarkable for its restraint, style, and seamless construction. It was narrative physics. The two brothers seemed tragically incapable of harmony. One’s ability to see the bright side forced the other into darkness.

This American version, written by David Benioff and directed by the Irishman Jim Sheridan, captures little of the original film’s psychological shading. Sam and Tommy aren’t on that crucial cosmic tether. What befalls them gets telegraphed to us. In the opening minutes, Sam gives an envelope addressed for Grace to a fellow Marine and says, “Hope you don’t have to deliver it.’’ Indeed, his letter stays buried in a drawer for full melodramatic effect.

With their giant eyes and lipless mouths, Gyllenhaal and Maguire could, indeed, be brothers. And a hollowed out and haunted Maguire plays his one disturbed note to perfection. He’s too good, in fact, since, when he explodes, he singes the rest of the movie.

The three Danish stars were older than their American counterparts and that difference turns out to be crucial. These lives are lived by real young people all over the country, but this cast seems too young to believably bear the stress. Plus, Maguire, Gyllenhaal, and Portman have become high-note actors. The lower emotional registers don’t seem to interest them. They’re not going for complete characters here. They’re going for scenes.

Sheridan is a one-note filmmaker, too. The torture passages here are of a piece with the political violence in his IRA films, “In the Name of the Father’’ and “The Boxer.’’ Such scenes are so effective that they make the other side of the movie unbearable. Thomas Newman’s jaunty score sounds like an entry in a James Taylor sound-alike contest, and it never stops. When it does, there are songs by Sheridan’s buddies U2.

Sheridan’s single note extends to the way he directs children: He can be violently cute. (His popular aggravation “In America’’ also featured two little girls.) That urge to film extreme cruelty and extreme innocence explains the film’s one good scene, set at a dinner table with the entire Cahill clan and a lady friend of Tommy’s. Sheridan manages an impossible balance of lightness and tension that culminates in Sam’s older daughter squeezing a balloon until it pops. Madison contorts the girl’s sweet nature until she eerily resembles her father. The scene is overdone, but it works.

By that point, “Brothers’’ has become just a juicy entertainment: See Sam go crazy. This is another movie about a fractured soldier and the posttraumatic stress of war. Yet there’s something distasteful in the way Sheridan relishes turning that trauma into a potboiler.

Genre: Drama, War

MPAA Rating: R

Trailer

Movie Website: Brothersfilm.com

Studio: Lionsgate

Director: Jim Sheridan

Screenwriter: David Benioff

Actors/Actresses: Natalie Portman, Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sam Shepard, Mare Winningham, Bailee Madison, Taylor Grace Geare

Our Verdict:

Brothers is an honest look at a family dealing with the after effects of war. It highlights the strain it puts on relationships and how it severs connections that were once strong. It will definitely make you think, but it’s not a life altering film.