For Reel

Brothers

Director: Jim Sheridan

“Brothers” is a film unfortunately doomed to come and go. Suffering from an unfortunate release date in the wake of “Avatar” and big Oscar hopefuls like “Up in the Air”, this bizarre tale of post-traumatic stress disorder hasn’t quite connected with American audiences. The film, however, is way too good to overlook.

A remake of Susanne Bier’s Danish film of the same title from 2004, “Brothers” deals with Capt. Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire), a captured soldier presumed dead in Afghanistan, and his black sheep brother, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), who attempts to comfort his brother’s wife, Grace (Natalie Portman), after learning of his death. Tommy, who is released from prison in the film’s opening credits, becomes a distressingly good surrogate for Sam – so much so that both Grace and her two daughters (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare) readily accept him as Sam’s replacement.

Sam is rescued shortly after being forced to do horrific things at the hands of his captors. He’s now scarred, distant – when first arriving at home, he shows no overt signs of aggression, but his eyes are void of any humanity. The man who had been so patient and loving in the film’s beginning now sits at the dinner table, eyes unblinking and glazed over, and nearly attacks his own daughter, who had been torturing him out of disdain. That dinner table scene, so masterfully performed by everyone involved (especially the children), exemplifies why “Brothers” cannot be overlooked.

The film has been criticized as melodramatic, but melodrama is not necessarily a bad thing. If you distance yourself from the proceedings, it’s easy to see the material as a bit silly, vague, implausible. Sheridan and his screenwriter, David Benioff, pace the material well enough that I was never distracted. The film’s promotion would’ve had you thinking it’s a thriller about an insane brother, but those commercials are deceptive in that they reveal the climax and nothing more. The rest of the film is methodically paced and quiet, letting the actors do what they can to draw us into their characters before all hell breaks loose.

I’ve never had much of a problem with the film’s three leads, but I also never quite knew they were capable of what they brought to the film. Gyllenhaal, in particular, gives what I might consider his best performance – watch his response to learning of Sam’s death, for instance, and then his interactions with Sam’s little girls. The transformation that Tommy goes through, from bad-boy to loving family man, could’ve been very hard-to-swallow, but Gyllenhaal is so terrific that it flows naturally. When Sam’s girls express that they prefer Tommy to their own father, we don’t question it.

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