Brothers

Seven word review of Brothers: Jim Sheridan should stick with the Irish.

Okay, I'll go on, but though Brothers is by no means a disaster, it's also a leaden exercise, as authentic as a frozen dinner. And that it comes from a director who has made such visceral and interesting films like My Left Foot, The Field, The Boxer, In the Name of the Father, and In America calls sharp attention to the fact that there is no mention of Belfast in this film.

The story hinges on a plot point that seems lifted out of a soap opera. A Marine (Tobey Maguire) is shot down in Afghanistan. He is presumed dead, although he has really been captured by the Taliban. But his family--wife Natalie Portman, father Sam Shepard, and brother Jake Gyllenhaal, go ahead and have a funeral for him. I know nothing about the procedure in this sort of situation, but it seems unlikely to me that the military would declare a man dead so quickly in the absence of a body. But that would inconvenience the story.

Maguire is the good son, a star quarterback in school, husband to the cheerleader, father to two adorable girls. Gyllenhaal, who is released from prison at the movie's outset, is the dissolute son, with a tattoo on his neck, scorned by his father, who was also a Marine. When Maguire is thought dead, he gains some maturity and becomes a surrogate father to the girls, and even shares an inappropriate kiss with Portman as they bond over U2 by candlelight. When Maguire comes back, after several months of torture, he's as crazy as a shit-house rat, and family dinners look like an O'Neill play.

The film was adapted from a Danish film by Susanne Bier by David Benioff. I haven't seen that film, but I would imagine it had more underlying pathos than the American version. In particular, the first half or so of Brothers was hard to take, as it seemed so lifeless and inert. It is presented so carefully, like an elaborate set-up, like the fake town in The Truman Show. We're in a town, Minnesota I think, where's it always winter, but I didn't get a sense of place. The characters, though inhabited by good actors, seemed just as phony. Portman, a good technical actress, is frequently caught in parts that she seems lost trying to bring to life. She's supposed to be beautiful, that's not the problem, it's just that I didn't buy her as a young mother who would have married the small town jock and then become a military wife. She seems like the type who would have wanted to split the one-horse town and have adventures.

Maguire and Gyllenhaal are a different problem. The geek universe must be getting a kick out of the fact that the actor who plays Spider-Man is cast as the brother of the actor who was rumored to replace him; unfortunately there's no inside joke of a kid playing with a Spidey action figure. The brothers are meant to transpose personalities--Maguire under brutal torture becomes the unhinged one, while the ex-con Gyllenhaal learns responsibility (and can renovate a kitchen), but the actors didn't sell it. From the beginning of the film, I found Gyllenhaal to behave perfectly reasonably (when he snaps at his father in an early scene, it's because the old man goaded him), while Maguire, with his gee-whiz stare, always seems a fraction from turning into Charles Whitman. We're told that Maguire was cool under pressure in football games, and while captive he counsels his co-prisoner to keep cool, but when he finally does go nuts, drawing his weapon to investigate a barking dog, we only lean back and acknowledge we expected this all along.

Two performers are perfectly at home in their characters. Shepard is a classic hard-ass, fighting his own demons from 'Nam, taking frequent nips from a hip flask, and making any family gathering uncomfortable. You can feel the other actors tensing when he walks into a room, and I could empathize. The best performance is a remarkable one by Bailee Madison as Maguire's older daughter. Her character is a child who is too sensitive for her own good, and can feel the undercurrents of rage from her father and the attraction between her mother and uncle. In a scene at her sister's birthday party, she acts out and says some things that are shockingly inappropriate, but the young actress makes us understand exactly where it's coming from.

If we lump this film in with others that have modern warfare as their subjects, it seems even more shallow. Stop-Loss and The Hurt Locker are much better at expressing the inexpressible--what it's like to actually fight a war in the 21st century. Brothers has no politics--it could have been any other country, but Afghanistan would do, although it has nothing good to say about the Afghans who are Maguire's captors--because it is more interested in the effects of war on those who have returned, a topic which goes back to at least The Best Years of Our Lives. In that regard, Brothers has nothing new to say.