Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
12/27/09
We've
always known that War is Hell, but those of us fortunate enough to have
never experienced it first-hand stubbornly refuse to internalize that truth.
And so, each new war brings with it the “shocking” revelation that the
soldier who returns from battle is not the same man who left. And
so too, another generation of movies dramatizing the horrors of post-traumatic
stress. Jim Sheridan's Brothers falls squarely into this genre,
but has a formidable weapon against seeming like “just another PTSD movie”:
its' story revolves around three characters whose lives are changed by
its' events, even though two of them never see a shot fired. A fascinating
and gripping slice of life served up with excellent performances, Brothers
never feels like a lecture, just a story of those people, none of whom
will ever be the same after War entered their lives.
Captain
Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) has been called back for another tour of duty
in Afghanistan, but before he goes, he is reunited with his brother Tommy
(Jake Gyllenhaal), who has just been released from prison. Tommy's
presence at Sam's farewell dinner angers their father Hank (Sam Shepard),
who has never really recovered from his own experience in Vietnam.
The Captain leaves behind his beloved family, wife Grace (Natalie Portman)
and daughters Isabelle (Bailee Madison) and Maggie (Taylor Geare), and
returns to command. Soon, a chopper carrying his unit is shot down,
and only he and Private Joe Willis (Patrick Flueger) survive. But
the military believes all hands were lost, and Grace is informed that her
husband has died. As she drifts through her routine in a daze of
sadness, a funny thing happens: screw-up Tommy starts showing up
around the house, doing work on the kitchen, looking after the girls, and
generally filling in for his lost brother. As Sam suffers unimaginable
horrors as a prisoner of war, the revised Cahill family grows closer and
closer until a drunken kiss threatens to ruin Tommy and Grace's bond.
And then, Sam turns up alive, a guilt-ridden shadow of himself obsessed
with what more than a kiss might have gone on in his absence.
You
can't really blame the Brothers ad campaign for giving away all
of the above, even though it takes you up to about the 2/3 mark in the
plot, since it's so hard to get paying customers to a drama these days.
But it's a pleasant surprise that the movie is engaging long before the
spectacular emotional fireworks of its' third act. A big reason for
that is that David Benioff's script kept surprising me with its' small
observations and spontaneous actions that make these familiar characters
feel like real people rather than plot automatons. Tommy knows he's
the “other” brother, and it makes a certain sense that in a world where
Sam's no longer around to clean up his messes, he'd look to find meaning
in fixing things for his family, even if that just meant meaningless kitchen
upgrades. And while 99% of movies would throw he and Grace into bed
together, the fact that their connection isn't romantic makes it feel fresh
and new.
But,
oh, if only they hadn't kissed... when Sam returns, awash in his own guilt
for reasons I'll leave for you to discover, he is like a radio tuned to
Tommy and Grace's downcast glances and can't see the way his brother has
bonded with the kids as anything but a play to steal his wife. And
the moment they don't come clean, no amount of explaining will do in the
eyes of a man who needs something, anything to focus on other than the
horrors hiding behind his eyelids. Once Sam gets back, Brothers
is about as scary as a non-horror movie is ever going to get, because you
have no idea if he'll go off and what he'll do when he does. Benioff
and Sheridan have a great sense of the rhythm of conversing around the
elephant in a room and the way kids don't do it nearly as well as adults.
It's bold to have Isabelle and Maggie be as scared of their Dad as they
are, and the two young actresses play those scenes skillfully. Jenny
Wade turns in a wonderful performance in a single scene as a girl Tommy
meets and brings to a family event for no reason other than that he MUST
have a date to show his face. While everyone else in the room walks
on a lifetime of pins and needles, she just can't stop talking, and the
table must have been blocked by the devil, because she's the only person
there who can't see Sam's reactions to what she's saying.
All
this works so well because Maguire is amazing. First, at establishing
Sam as a wonderful husband, father and brother, then at enduring his anguish
behind enemy lines until he finally cracks, and finally in the bravura
scenes upon his return. The returning Sam is horrifyingly still,
seemingly devoting three-quarters of his attention to unheard voices, and
it's impossible to predict how he'll react to anything from a perceived
slight to an innocent joke he for some reason doesn't understand.
And when he finally explodes, I wasn't just scared for everyone around
him, I was scared FOR him, because Maguire had done such a great job making
me care about the guy Sam used to be. That second level of tension,
worrying not just about what he'll do, but that he might not be able to
undo it, is what really makes the last third of the movie sing.
The
rest of the cast keeps up admirably, with Portman and Gyllenhaal delivering
solid, lived-in performances noteworthy for how much they can do without
ever raising their voices or delivering soliloquies. Shepard can
play this kind of gruff, disapproving father in his sleep, but that doesn't
mean he's not great at it. Flueger, a great young actor who should
work more, is terrific as the Private who is just a little less capable
of handling the stress of captivity that his Captain. And Carey Mulligan
has a couple of solid scenes as his widow, whose most innocent questions
are more than Sam can deal with.
Sheridan
orchestrates all this with a deft hand, and his countrymen U2 provide a
wonderful song called “Winter” for the end credits. Brothers
is the kind of movie that's fallen out of favor both because it deals with
uncomfortable realities and because it doesn't contain any pratfalls or
hundred-foot robots. But drama need not be dull, and it crackles
with suspense in large part because it takes the time to establish people
we can really care about. If only we didn't need to hear this kind
of story so often. |
