Brothers

Brothers
Directed by Jim Sheridan
Runtime: 110 min.

Jim Sheridan’s Brothers is a milestone in post-9/11 movies. It’s less about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than it is about the wars between people. Sam and Tommy Cahill (Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal) are close brothers but different types. Sam’s a Marine captain and Tommy’s a jailbird screw-up. Their rift—ostensibly over Sam’s wife, Grace (Natalie Portman)—is based on no more than misunderstanding, a psychotic error. But the film’s moving thesis (script by David Benioff, based on Susanne Bier’s 2004 Danish film) holds that this—strife between brothers—is the essence of war.
Many may be too cynical and partisan at this point to readily accept Sheridan’s humane proposition but only the hard-hearted or insensitive can deny the lucidity and power of his filmmaking. In the introduction of Sam and Grace’s home life, a tender scene with the oldest of their two disarmingly spontaneous daughters changes to Tommy’s incarceration, and the shift is jolting. From ravishing gentleness to recognizable harshness, Sheridan describes a range of contemporary experience and finds it common to an American family. It’s a class observation that most American filmmakers avoid, but Irishman Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, The Boxer, In America) doesn’t shy away from it. His cultural understanding of fractured unity gives Brothers depth beyond its basic premise.

There’s a Cain and Abel nugget inside this movie that extends to the war scenes in Afghanistan (properly introduced via cellphone video footage). When Sam goes on another tour of duty and is captured by the Taliban, he witnesses several horrors, one a crucial reiteration of original sin. If Sheridan and Benioff’s concept goes weak, it’s only because it lacks a religious/cultural buttress. That, too, has gone out of favor in most American films—even credible ones like Shotgun Stories. Still, Sheridan imputes some of the core moral understanding, the description of crisis and experience that the West draws from religion. He evokes what Bruce Springsteen shows about the religion/moral undercurrent of American life in his superb album Magic.
In Brothers, Sheridan doesn’t exploit wartime distress; he expertly locates it in the decency of Tommy coming back to the fold, bringing friends to remodel Grace’s kitchen. It’s also apparent in the armed services legacy upheld by the brothers’ father (Sam Shepard giving a masterful performance in a few simple strokes) and in the different fears that animate the brotherss eyes—making Maguire and Gyllenhaal, at first so dissimilar, strikingly alike. As they change, their reversal turns one into the other. Positive or negative, the similarity is haunting, a movie form of Springsteen magic.
The most jolting aspect of Brothers is the seriousness of its undeniably sexy cast; Maguire, Portman and Gyllenhaal represent—idealize—common forms of modern experience. That’s rare to see outside movies that falsify American life (such as George Clooney in Up in the Air or Nicole Kidman in anything). Attractiveness draws the lives of the Cahills closer. Acting out anguish or ardor, they enhance those emotions and make them identifiable. This also appears in breathtaking details like the squabbling daughters who replay sibling rivalry in the next generation. At an extraordinary celebration dinner scene, children intuit adult tensions while suffering their own confusion.
Brothers powerfully corrects the misperceptions of most recent post-9/11 films. Its emotional boldness fills the spiritual hole of The Hurt Locker where a gnomic soldier denies his family feeling; its unabashed decency answers the pessimism of The Messenger; its horrifying view of war at home and abroad revises Tarantino’s war mythology in Inglourious Basterds. When the Taliban (they epitomize evil as Nazis used to) forces a pipe into Sam’s hands, Sheridan amends the sadism of Tarantino’s deplorable baseball bat joke. Sheridan declines the dissociative artiness and blame that hipster filmmakers use to exempt themselves from today’s wars. Continued praise for these films show some people long for a relevant answer film, an Apocalypse Now, Coming Home or The Deer Hunter to justify their attitudes—attitudes that Brothers is too generous to appease. Instead, Sheridan goes for pure feeling: Sam’s collapse is heartbreaking, but the scene where he returns home and senses accusation in an infant’s stare is one of the most unnerving moments in the history of war or family movies.