Boil It Down: Two-and-a-half quality performances are ultimately wasted by a script that wants to do everything all at once.
Brothers, based on the Dannish film Brødre by Susanne Bier, unites three actors poised to be the current generation's heavy hitters and thrusts them into a genre which has managed zero box office traction, despite the talent or quality of the script. Here, Oscar-nominated director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, The Boxer) takes on a story put into motion by the Afghanistan War and exacerbated, as far as the audience can tell, by the incompetence of the American military.
It is with mixed emotion Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) ships out for another tour of duty with the Marines in Afghanistan. His brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) has just been released from prison, causing his family to be complete again. But he also wants to be with his men in the field. His helicopter goes down in the mountains and, presumed dead, Grace (Natalie Portman), Tommy and the Cahill's are forced to reconstruct their lives without him. Just as they're moving forward, Tommy returns with a severe case of post traumatic stress disorder, making him a very different man than the one they all remember.
Either through design or a shoddy script, Brothers excels at raising questions but not answering them. Maybe that's the best way to address the situation, in the long run, considering how many other films have tried to answer the difficult questions about military engagements in the Middle East. Here, though, it ends up feeling like a cop out, as if Sheridan and screenwriter David Benioff purposely introduce as many plot elements as they can to fill the running time. In the beginning of the picture, one of Sam and Grace's little girls tells Uncle Tommy Mom doesn't like him. And yet, with no semblance of an explanation, Grace opens up her heart to him by retrieving him-broke and drunk-from a local bar. Why? Brothers doesn't care, content to have any number of outstanding plot points sitting on the screen, begging to be brought to a conclusion.
Okay, so maybe the connective tissue getting their relationship from point A to point B is relatively simple and the filmmakers didn't feel they needed to spell it out. After all, Tommy reminds Grace of Sam and he's family. But later on, when former prisoner of war Sam returns without so much as a peep about counseling or hospitalization, the red flags should be raised. The film crosscuts the family drama in the States with Sam's ordeal as a prisoner in Afghanistan, a technique I'll talk about in a minute. At no point from Sam's rescue to the time the audience sees him land on American soil is there a mention of what happened to him. The script asks us to buy into the military letting him go back to civilian life with no questions asked. (A later scene does mention continuing counseling, but that's it.) It should strike any halfway intelligent person as foolish to let a Marine who was captured by the enemy go right back to his family. Events occur in Brothers for no legitimate rhyme or reason other than the plot is forcing the characters to take a certain path.
Now, about juxtaposing Tommy, Grace and the kids with Sam in Afghanistan. Benioff and Sheridan tip their hand too early, showing the audience Sam is actually alive and, thus, ruining the tension of the piece. There is an advantage to cutting from a prison camp back to home; in oblique terms, it shows what Sam is protecting by being a Marine and what ultimately makes him bash a fellow captive with a pipe. Stark reality vs. insulated protection. Absolute right vs. absolute evil. It also prevents the film from ever getting too emotionally cold or warm. What it also does is constantly remind the audience Sam is alive, so when the Cahill's start to smile again or draw closer to one another, the inevitable ton of bricks is always looming.
Until Sam returns to his family, Maguire easily has the hardest time with the material given to him as a father, a husband, a son and a Marine. Simply put, his delivery is so wooden, it's hard to believe anything he says, from the way he plays with daughters Isabelle and Maggie to the way he talks down to Tommy. Offputting might be the right word and, considering the "pod person"-esque way he returns, it's a wonder anyone realizes something is wrong. Perhaps to the benefit of the production, Maguire is constantly teamed with either Portman or Gyllenhaal, allowing their performances to elevate his. In the second half of the film, this personae makes Sam nearly impossible to take your eyes off of, especially in a shocking dinner scene. To be fair, the entire audience knows what's coming, yet there's no way to be adequately prepared for the outburst
Gyllanhaal and Portman play off each other nicely; they certainly have more chemistry than Maguire and Portman. And that's the thing: if the lead male roles were reversed, Brothers may have come out as a better movie. Maquire can play the rough around the edges ex-con with gusto while Gyllenhaal also does well with wild-eyed paranoia. We'd be more apt to believe Maguire as Tommy than Sam, honestly. Sheridan provides an even keel for the movie, making sure not to get bogged down in any one scene or fancy camera move. He imbues the film with a sense of reality from the get go, as if every angle the camera sees could be seen by a real person. If only that same restraint could have been applied to the script, where characters acted like real people instead of pawns being moved around a chess board.
Without anything truly important to say-there's no political statements, no lessons on family, no take-away on how to strengthen the military or the people who serve in it-Brothers languishes on the screen. The finished product is so hellbent on not taking a stand it, as the old saying goes, will fall for anything. Sadly, it wants to trap the audience in the same mindset.
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