Brothers review by Ben Kenber

Brothers is Jim Sheridan’s remake of Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish film of the same name, and it continues his long fascination with families torn apart by war and strife, and of how they fight their hardest to keep it all together. It stars Tobey Maguire as Sam Cahill, a Captain in the United States Marine Corp who is about to be sent off for another tour of duty in Afghanistan. Before he goes, he picks up his young brother Tommy (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) who just got released from prison after a sentence for armed robbery. Despite their differences, they are as close as brothers can be, even if their father (the always reliable Sam Shepherd) clearly values one over the other. But then things get completely turned around and not necessarily for the better.

When Sam’s helicopter crashes in foreign territory, he is assumed dead. No one even bothers to tell Tommy right away, which shows you the respect he has compared to Sam. But you know from there that he will eventually bond with Sam’s wife Grace (the always lovely Natalie Portman) and her two adorable girls Isabelle and Maggie (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare), and that Tommy and Grace will get more intimate with each other than they should.

But surprise, surprise, Sam turns out to be alive after having been tortured physically and mentally by militant forces. Thanks to a decision made a la Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, Sam makes it back home to his loving family, but he’s not the same. Full of anger and self-loathing, he becomes distant from everyone around him and has no idea where or how to channel his anger. Soon, he becomes obsessed with going back to Afghanistan to do another tour of duty as he feels that he can still be of help over there. But what’s worse is that Sam begins to think that Tommy has slept with Grace, and his paranoia becomes all too consuming to where reality is just far too difficult to face.

If you have seen the trailer for Brothers already, then you will pretty much get the structure of the film as its beginning, middle, and end parts are clearly defined with only the end being unpredictable. Overall, the movie feels like an average melodrama with the brothers being inseparable, the parent valuing one child over the other, etc. I have seen a lot of movies like this, so the aura of familiarity feels all too played out for me to get completely involved with what’s going on here. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about Brothers in the way it treats war and the damage it can do to soldiers and the families they come back to. I guess I just wished that Sheridan had brought more to this remake than what has been done and overdone with the aftermath of war.

Don’t get me wrong though; Brothers is by no means a terrible movie. Director Sheridan does a very good job of giving everything a very down to earth feel which draws us much deeper into the story. With a movie like Brothers, this is especially important. The majority of the action takes place in an everyday American town that does not feel all that different from the ones we grew up in. That air of realism keeps the movie from being completely average, and I do want to acknowledge the effort the filmmakers put into it.

But the major strength of Brothers that really makes it worth watching though is the acting. All three main actors are superb in roles you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see in. Jake Gyllenhaal is surprisingly good as the rough and tumble Tommy when you consider that he has mostly been typecast as the good guy in Hollywood. Then again, this is the same actor who played Donnie Darko, a character who flooded an entire school and set Patrick Swayze’s house on fire, so you got to give him that. Jake never overplays the character here, and he manages to keep Tommy from seeing like a stereotypical criminal who is not the heartless thug certain people make him out to be.

Seeing the ever so radiant Natalie Portman here is a scary reminder of how horrifically stiff she came off in those Star Wars prequels (thanks a lot George Lucas!). From a distance, she looks too young to take on the role of a mother of two. I mean, as Princess Amidala she did give birth to Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, but her character died just after giving birth, so does that still count? Oh well, it doesn’t matter because Natalie does the kind of excellent work we have always come to expect to her. She handles the complexities of her character with utter skill, and never do we see her acting. Natalie inhabits Grace and gives her strength and inescapable vulnerability in the midst of a tragedy she hoped to never experience first hand.

But the best performance in Brothers clearly belongs to Tobey Maguire who takes his character from a loving father and patriotic soldier to a mere cinder of his former self. When we see him come back from a war everyone thought he perished in, Tobey succeeds in making Sam Cahill a very frightening presence whose change in personality escalates the tension in everyone around him. Like an unstable piece of nitroglycerin on the verge of exploding if you shake it just a little, we stand at attention, knowing he will eventually explode and hope that the damage won’t be too severe. Maguire is a very long way from Peter Parker and Spider-Man with this one, and he once again proves there is more to him than that iconic character (which he won’t be playing anymore anyway).

Furthermore, all three stars are surrounded by a great cast of stellar actors. Sam Shepherd makes roles like the father seem ever so effortless for him to play, and while his is a predictably clichéd character, he still imbues Hank Cahill with a real humanity that is strongly felt. It’s also always great to see Mare Winnigham as Hank’s wife Elsie, and she continues to be one of those underrated actors who never fail in doing fantastic work in one project after another.

However, I really have to give special recognition to the two child actors Bailee Madison & Taylor Grace Geare who give amazingly unforced performances as the young Cahill daughters. I keep talking a lot about certain kids who give performances that are far beyond what we could typically expect (Max Records from Where The Wild Things Are for example), but these two girls come across as so natural to where (like Natalie) you never catch them acting. Bailee Madison makes an especially strong impression as Isabelle, particularly in the scene where she intentionally irritates her dad whom she no longer recognizes.

Indeed, there are a lot of strong things about Brothers, and Sheridan remains a director great at capturing the dynamics of families struggling to get past a swift change that upsets their entire balance of living. I really want to give it a solid recommendation, but the movie still feels overly familiar, and it pales in comparison to so many other movies of its type. The movie’s climax seems a little too simplistic given what we have witnessed, and it feels like it ends long before it should have as if it were cut off at the halfway point. I wanted to see a little more of the aftermath, but what we get instead is something much too convenient that doesn’t resolve the conflict completely.

Brothers does make for a good rental based on the performances alone, but in retrospect, I don’t think that I missed too much by not seeing it in a movie theater.

**½ out of ****