Brothers (2009)

Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal at the Los Alamos ice rink

WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD

In the interest of full disclosure, I should preface this review by saying that I'm actually in this movie. More specifically, the back of my head makes its major motion picture debut for a grand total of about eight seconds during the big funeral scene toward the beginning.

So I was maybe a little predisposed to like it. Not only am I in it (sort of), the majority of the movie was shot right in my home town. For those of you who grew up somewhere like New York or LA, that's not probably not a big deal. But for us Hilltoppers, it's kind of cool. Even movies about Los Alamos (like Roland Joffe's 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy) aren't usually shot there.

Brothers, directed by Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In The Name Of The Father) and a remake of Susanne Biers 2005 Danish film Brødre, tells the story of Sam and Tommy Cahill. Sam (Tobey Maguire) is the good brother, a star athlete married to his high-school sweetheart Grace (Natalie Portman) and father to two adorable little girls (Bailee Madison and Taylor Grace Geare). He's also a decorated Marine on his way back to Afghanistan. Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the bad brother, recently paroled after doing a three-year prison stint for armed robbery. Grace isn't Tommy's biggest fan. Neither, it seems, is Sam and Tommy's stern alcoholic father (Sam Shephard).

When Sam's helicopter goes down in Afghanistan and he's presumed dead, Tommy tries in his clumsy way to fill the void left by his absence. He does this at first by getting drunk and calling Grace at three in the morning to come pay his bar tab. Oops. After this inauspicious start, he slowly and inevitably steps up to the plate. After enlisting three friends to remodel Grace's kitchen and spending time with his nieces, Grace -- almost reluctantly -- begins to thaw. Brother and sister-in-law grow ever closer. Eventually, Grace and Tommy spend an evening together smoking pot and reminiscing about Sam. One thing leads to another and, in a weak moment, their emotions (unsurprisingly) get the better of them.

Before long Tommy -- a crude but well-meaning facsimile of his lost brother -- has, without quite meaning to, supplanted Sam's memory in his grieving family's hearts.

And then Sam comes home.

There has been a lot of bitching and moaning about how the trailer gives too much away, and before seeing the movie I would have agreed. After seeing it, we'd all be forgiven for thinking we know exactly what this movie's about: bad brother sleeps with dead good brother's wife, good brother (not dead after all) comes home and, after finding out bad brother and wife got their freak on, flips out and goes on a shooting spree.

But, now that I've seen the film, I have to say that trailer was actually a pretty clever bait-and-switch on the studio's part. Obviously they want to sell this as either a sexy melodrama, a taut suspense movie, or, preferably, both. But Brothers isn't really about any of that. It's not about infidelity any more than it is a thriller about a psychotic soldier with a gun. What it's about is family, and the way war can bend and twist a family into something tortured and unrecognizable.

Sheridan cuts back and forth between Grace and Tommy's domestic life stateside and Sam's harrowing experience as a Taliban prisoner. The potential second-act "oh shit" movie moment of finding out Sam's fate is neatly sidestepped. When Grace receives the call that he's alive, Sheridan handles the moment with nothing more than a ringing phone and a look on Portman's face.

Sam returns a changed man. Haunted by what he's seen and done and carrying a yolk of guilt around his neck that not even his Vietnam vet father can understand, he projects all his fury and self-loathing outward at Grace and Tommy. Whether or not his wife and his brother actually slept together is beside the point. Sam, desperately looking for a place to put his rage, convinces himself of such. He coils up amidst his increasingly concerned family like a tightly smiling snake ready to strike. Grace, Tommy, and the girls are soon terrified of this unfamiliar and maybe dangerous stranger who has appeared in their midst.

In movies like In The Name Of The Father and In America, Sheridan has proven himself to be one of the most exacting chroniclers of familial nuance that cinema has to offer. So it's no surprise that the most convincing parts of Brothers involve the family. Each of these characters could have been stock, but Sheridan and screenwriter David Benioff's eye for detail saves them, and Sheridan leads his cast to some of the finest and subtly affecting performances of their careers.

Portman has never been one of my favorite actresses. She has always seemed so deliberate and hyper-intellectual to me, and her performances have tended to feel like a bundle of ticks and actorly "choices" rather than fully realized characters. Here, in the thankless role of the grieving wife, she manages -- finally -- to eschew her tendency to overthink. She inhabits Grace thoroughly. Grace's pain is almost entirely internal, and Portman lets it bleed out here and there through looks and gestures. When she does cry, the work she and Sheridan have done to keep Grace firmly grounded makes those bigger moments ring true. Later, when she tries to reach out to Sam, the tangled mess of love, torment, guilt, and confusion seems to seep right out through her pores.

Gyllenhaal manages to keep Tommy from drifting into caricature. Tommy is charming, well-meaning, a little flaky, and more than a little devilish. He's also all twisted up with his own Freudian rage and font of self loathing. It would have been easy to go over the top, to hit the dark notes too hard, but Gyllenhaal wisely keeps it simple. The chemistry between him and Portman is thick, but they keep it throbbing at a low hum rather than letting it cycle up to a high whine. When their resolve finally crumbles and they give in to their temptations, the moment is deceptively small but deeply resonant.

The only real false notes for me in Gyllenhaal's performance are the two or three times the script calls on him to play drunk. A wise actor -- okay, Miguel -- once told me that the biggest mistake an actor can make when playing a drunk is to "act drunk" because actual drunks, by and large, try to act sober. Gyllenhaal, unfortunately, goes for the easy choice and you can just see the "acting" all over the screen. Just compare what he does to what Shephard does after the funeral scene, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Shephard, for my money, is the best thing in the movie. His character -- the stern military father constantly comparing his two sons -- is the most fraught with potential for cliche and melodrama. And the script, to be honest, doesn't do him any favors in the early bits (I almost groaned aloud during his rote "why can't you be more like your brother" moment). But Shephard is a pro and he manages to pivot away from our expectations, presenting a flawed man struggling with his own pain who loves both of his sons deeply but just doesn't quite know how to say or do the right thing. After Tommy starts proving himself to both Grace and his dad, Shephard's scenes with Gyllenhaal ("How'd you get so handy?" he admiringly asks as Tommy puts molding on the cabinets) are textbook examples of how less is usually more and what's not said can be more powerful than what is. Later, when he recognizes that Sam is struggling and stumblingly tries to reach out to him, you just want to give the big guy a hug.

The lion's share of the capital-A "ACTING" burden falls, of course, on Maguire, who has to go from loving husband and father to dangerous psycho in just under two hours. This is where Brothers both soars and falters. I had an animated discussion with the folks I saw the movie with afterwards, who felt that they just didn't buy his character from the start. He never seems to really connect with either Portman or his children before he ships out, and so the impact of his loss on the family is not quite felt. My friends were never really rooting for him to come back, they said, which lessened the impact of his return.

I could see their point, but -- whether intentional or not -- the stilted nature of his performance felt true to me. Sam is a professional soldier who, it's suggested, has been away before. It seems not only plausible to me but almost necessary that he would struggle, even in the absence of the trauma later inflicted upon him in Afghanistan, to completely plug back into his civilian life. The same would be true for anyone, military or not, who was away from his family for extended periods of time. I would imagine that most of the men and women currently serving overseas right now would identify with his struggle.

However, the question of whether Maguire -- eternally geeky, awkward, and seemingly light as a feather -- is believable as a Marine at all is debatable. I bought it...just. One of my movie-going compatriots suggested it might have worked better if Maguire and Gyllenhaal had swapped roles. I'm not sure I could buy Maguire as a paroled ex-con any more than I buy him as a soldier., but having seen Jarhead (2005), I can agree that Gyllenhaal would have made the more convincing Marine.

Sheridan's touch with the family dynamic is near perfect, but he stumbles badly when he turns his attention toward Afghanistan. It didn't help that I kept noticing how much "Afghanistan" looked like the outskirts of Albuquerque, but even putting that aside I was just never quite able to buy into the reality the film tries to present. Every Afghanistan scene feels like a different movie, complete with mustache (or beard)-twirling Taliban baddies and tired war-movie dialogue ("Give them nothing, Private!" Sam shouts at a fellow prisoner who's being tortured. "Your life depends on it!"). Sheridan and Benioff seem not altogether interested in really capturing the verisimilitude of war, so they try to shorthand those scenes as much as possible. Unfortunately, that means that when Sam is finally pushed into an irredeemable act of violence the moment is simply not earned.

That makes it even more impressive, then, how much power is in the film's punch after Sam arrives home. What Maguire puts forth in the last forty-five minutes or so of the movie is amongst the most haunting screen acting I've ever seen. Four simple scenes stand out to me. In the first, Sam -- utterly unable to connect with his civilian life and desperate to rid himself of the guilt chewing away at his fevered brain -- tries to talk his commanding officer into sending him back to Afghanistan. "I've just been thinking about my men," he says, smiling and trying to hide the flowering madness that lurks behind his eyes. In the second and third, Sam very quietly confronts both Tommy and Grace about their relationship. "I can forgive you," he tells Tommy...and we almost believe him. Again, Sheridan does more here with looks than with dialogue. The third scene features a birthday party set around a dining room table, and it's one of the scariest scenes you're likely to see in a movie this year.

Sam is a ticking timebomb, as the saying goes, and when he finally blows (again, no spoiler here; it's all in the trailer) the look of utter disconnect in his eyes as he rages is both terrifying and utterly heartbreaking.

Upon leaving the theater, I have to admit that overall I was a bit underwhelmed. I described Brothers as two-thirds of a decent movie and one third of a very good movie. But the damn thing put its claws in me and had me tossing and turning all night. I still think, in a stronger year, Brothers would probably have a hard time getting nominated for an Oscar. This year, however, I wouldn't be surprised to see it at least get a nod. When it's good it's very good, and it has moments where it actually approaches great.

I have no idea what the film's commercial prospects are. The conventional wisdom, after notable failures like In The Valley of Elah and The Kingdom, is that films concerned with either of the current wars (Iraq or Afghanistan) are destined to fail at the box office. Nobody wants to get bummed out when they go to the movies, the thinking goes. But in Brothers Sheridan deftly avoids the temptation toward politics (as much as is possible, at least) and keeps his lens focused squarely on the human drama. You could probably call Brothers an anti-war movie if you really wanted, but it's far from a polemic. In light of President Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan and the recent tragedy at Fort Drum, I think Brothers is as fitting and sober a tribute to the men and women in the U.S. military and their families as Hollywood is likely to offer.