Brothers is a movie
built on that jarring disconnect between combat zone and “back home.”
Part POW thriller, part romance, with a big helping of
melodrama, Jim Sheridan’s film is about a brother who went off to war, was
declared dead, but returns a changed man. And it’s about the brother left
behind, a man changed by his soldier sibling’s sacrifice, and by stepping into
his brother’s role with the missing man’s family.
A mature, lean Tobey Maguire is Capt. Sam Cahill, the son
who followed Dad (Sam Shepard) into the Marine Corps and is about to go back to
Afghanistan. Jake Gyllenhaal is perfectly cast as Tommy, the prodigal son we
meet as Sam picks him up from prison. Tommy always drank too much and got into
trouble. Sam is the alpha male the old man is proud of.
“Why don’t you try mimicking your brother for a
change?” is Dad’s only advice, picking up their father-son fight the
moment the convict gets home.
Sam’s wife, Grace (Natalie Portman), has hated the slacker
Tommy since high school. When Sam ships out and his helicopter goes down and he
is listed as dead within day, that doesn’t change.
Adapting a Danish film by Susanne Bier, Sheridan (My Left
Foot) gives away Sam’s fate — he’s a
prisoner of the Taliban — right away. He contrasts Sam’s ordeal with Tommy’s
transformation back home. Sam is tortured while Tommy charms one and all to
pop-music accompaniment. Sam is tested, and Tommy starts to think about someone
other than himself — caring for his brother’s young daughters and widow.
And then Sam comes home.
The home-front scenes are so cute — skating dates, making
pancakes for Mommy, cute contractors helping Tommy fix up Grace’s kitchen —
that they feel like another movie set in another world. But that’s how vets
describe their dislocation trying to talk with people who “wouldn’t
understand.”
Sheridan, at home working with kids and dealing with dark
subjects, doesn’t quite get the balance right, especially when you compare Brothers with the superior soldiers’ homecoming drama The
Messenger, which has more weight, less
melodrama and rarely hits “cute.”
But as predicable and cloying as Brothers sometimes is, the cast is fascinating — young actors
now possessing the dramatic heft to pull something like this off. Maguire, as
Sam, comes unhinged in subtle, realistic ways and Gyllenhaal and Portman react
to him with a convincing blend of fear and pity. Putting them all at a table
with Shepard and veteran character actress Mare Winningham makes for intimate,
beautifully-played drama, even if we have a feeling that we’ve seen all this
before.
Brothers
3 stars
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman
Director: Jim Sheridan
Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes
Industry rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and brief
strong language
Roger Moore writes for the Orlando Sentinel. Via McClatchy Tribune News Service.
