Brothers

Mounting tension, battlefront to home front

December 04, 2009|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

It would be nice to report that “Brothers’’ is a film about how Shaq and Kobe made up by hugging out old beefs. It is, instead, the story of Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire), his brother, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), and the terrible misunderstanding that almost ruins their family. The movie is in trouble long before they are. This is a corny tale, told with both generous helpings of deli-sliced cheese and a brief stretch of chilling tumultuousness.

Sam is a Marine captain bound for another deployment in Afghanistan. Not long before he leaves, he picks up Tommy on his first day out of prison. Sam is stern and serious, a professional soldier. He has a high, tight haircut, he loves his wife, Grace (Natalie Portman) and two small daughters (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare), and might love serving his country even more. His father, Hank (Sam Shepard), was also a Marine. Tommy is the family flop. He drinks like his father but serves only himself.

With Sam overseas, the movie breaks in half, then falls apart. Sam’s helicopter is shot down, and he is presumed dead. The family holds a funeral, and his wife and girls begin to move on, with a sober and sobered Tommy subbing, unconvincingly, as a husbandly and fatherly surrogate. He gets some buddies to renovate his brother’s kitchen and provides Grace and the girls with a man around the house. Only barely is there a sexual spark. But that’s plenty to drive the mania of the movie’s second half.

As it happens, Sam is very much alive, a hostage of aggrieved, camcorder-wielding Afghan fighters. While he and a private (Patrick Flueger) are subjected to mind-bending terror in Afghanistan, we’re being tortured here at home. Every time, the film cuts from the devastated look on Maguire’s face to a scene of Gyllenhaal frolicking with the two girls or getting high with Portman, it’s like being splashed with frigid water.

“Brothers’’ is a remake of a 2004 Danish drama, directed and co-written by Susanne Bier and also about a soldier in Afghanistan and his ne’er-do-well brother. The movie was remarkable for its restraint, style, and seamless construction. It was narrative physics. The two brothers seemed tragically incapable of harmony. One’s ability to see the bright side forced the other into darkness.

This American version, written by David Benioff and directed by the Irishman Jim Sheridan, captures little of the original film’s psychological shading. Sam and Tommy aren’t on that crucial cosmic tether. What befalls them gets telegraphed to us. In the opening minutes, Sam gives an envelope addressed for Grace to a fellow Marine and says, “Hope you don’t have to deliver it.’’ Indeed, his letter stays buried in a drawer for full melodramatic effect.