It would be nice to report that “Brothers’’ is a film about how Shaq and Kobe
made up by hugging out old beefs. It is, instead, the story of Sam Cahill (Tobey
Maguire), his brother, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), and the terrible
misunderstanding that almost ruins their family. The movie is in trouble long
before they are. This is a corny tale, told with both generous helpings of
deli-sliced cheese and a brief stretch of chilling tumultuousness.
Sam is a Marine captain bound for another deployment in Afghanistan. Not long
before he leaves, he picks up Tommy on his first day out of prison. Sam is stern
and serious, a professional soldier. He has a high, tight haircut, he loves his
wife, Grace (Natalie Portman) and two small daughters (Bailee Madison and Taylor
Geare), and might love serving his country even more. His father, Hank (Sam
Shepard), was also a Marine. Tommy is the family flop. He drinks like his father
but serves only himself.
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.
