Movie Review: Brothers

Justin reviewed my beloved Natalie Portman and a bunch of people who aren't Natalie Portman in Brothers this weekend. I'm not going to make this post all about me, like it usually is. I'm just going to briefly post a picture of Natalie Portman looking hot and then present the review.

Hotness


Reviewness

No Quiet on the Home Front
Brothers takes a stab at bringing the war home
Justin Senkbile

Encountering a movie like director Jim Sheridan's Brothers is a little confusing. Although it entirely depends on today's world, it somehow remains completely forgettable and uninsightful. It's the tale of a family broken by war, specifically the war in Afghanistan; if one were to leave that detail out, the movie would feel like a melodrama straight out of 50s Hollywood, slapping on emotions hastily but in vivid colors, uneven but exciting. That said, Afghanistan is involved, and thus, in light of today's world and today's war, Brothers seems frivolous and almost unfinished.

Marine Captain Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire), prized son, all-American dad and star soldier, is presumed to have died during a mission in Afghanistan. In their mourning, Sam's wife Grace (Natalie Portman) and black-sheep younger brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) develop an intense bond. The hours with Grace and her daughters (Taylor Geare and Bailee Madison) serve to free ex-con Tommy from his drunken, failure-laden past. Whereas for Grace, Tommy's presence serves as a slight antidote for the void left by the death of her husband.

Of course, that's when Sam shows up. He hadn't died after all but was imprisoned and tortured by vicious insurgents. After the wartime trauma, Sam returns home paranoid, disoriented and completely disconnected. His sudden fits of rage terrify his daughters, and Grace and Tommy start to get nervous as well when they realize Sam is convinced they're having an affair.

Sam is intensely disturbed and intensely played by Maguire, but it's frustrating to imagine the possibilities this character presented that were ignored in favor of clichés. Sam ends up being too one-dimensional to be taken seriously as any sort of victim. In fact, towards the end, Sam seems less and less like a traumatized man and more like a slasher movie villain. Tommy too has his fair share of corny moments, but Gyllenhaal seems totally at ease with Tommy's casual arrogance mixed with sweetness. Plus, he's in all of the film's sharpest scenes, the ones between Tommy and his ex-marine father Hank (playwright Sam Shepard).

Portman is surprisingly convincing as a mother but never gets room to do much more than sob, despite being the emotional centerpiece of the whole endeavor. Tied inextricably to the roles of mother and wife, Grace appropriately gets only one real scene to reveal herself—with two young kids and a supposedly dead husband, such moments must indeed be hard for her to come by. Unfortunately, the scene is yet another cliché, staged in front of a fireplace with Tommy and some pot.

Brothers is almost like the shell of a movie. It cries, yells and flails around but expresses nothing more than that. The idea seems to be to reiterate the phrase "war is hell" but it ultimately fails because it has nothing new to add and has little of interest to show us. In the end, Brothers is just too uneven and unfocused to leave us with much to ponder.

Grade: C-