Brothers (C-)
(R for profanity, disturbing violent content): Serious flaws prevent this adaptation of a touching Danish original as David Benioff's Hollywoodized script, Irish director Jim Sheridan's inability to make the most of his American cast, and bad casting of puckish Tobey Maguire as a Marine Captain in the war against Afghanistan, all but erase the effectiveness & power of the Danish movie.
What was a censorious depiction of the plight of military men and their immediate families, when they return emotionally scarred from battle, in the original has been made stereotypical and by-the-numbers. In fact, the audience snickered at over-the-top emoting while one fellow found more interest in his tweeter correspondence throughout the entire 110-minutes of the film. Some testimonial!
Drawn into the plot is the sibling conflict between two brothers in an alternating love/hate relationship. One, older, Captain Sam Cahill (Maguire) is the goody-goody-two-shoes and his father's hallowed boy. The other, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal, in an unshaven growth of beard that never changes over the entire length of a year), is the black sheep of the family.
When Sam has been reported dead (instead of missing in action?) Tommy moves into Sam's family, gradually winning Sam's wife & 2 little daughters in doing so. Then Sam returns home after a grueling experience in captivity & changes into some sort of paranoid psycho. In shifting dynamics, questions are left unanswered: who will win out? How will they come to terms over changed family issues? How will the women caught between them handle their roles? How will the impressionable kids handle it?
Serious stuff. Cinetographer Fred Elmes does his level best to create the contrasting details between the ugliness in war-torn Afghanistan & the white picket fenced milieu in a sickeningly sweet New Mexican Utopia. Thomas Newman's twangy down-home score heightens the country-western mood while Jay Cassidy edits with rapid cuts between the two worlds to suggest impending conflicts & similarities in them.
Sorriest of all is what director Sheridan does wrong. A 6-time Oscar nominee for his earlier films, he is received with great expectation. His development of Daniel Day-Lewis in "My Left Foot" alone set him onto a film pedestal. Here, for whatever reasons, he has turned his cast into predictably stereotypical characters who never seem quite real - the high school cheerleader (Natalie Portman) into a mother & tortured supposed widow, the gently laid-back football hero (Maguire) into a somber & confused vet, his brother (Gyllenhaal, closest to becoming a true James Dean/Marlon Brando rebel), with Sam Shepard as the typical ex-soldier father. Everything is done by rote, by the numbers.
I could go on, but suffice it to say that a potentially powerful story has been subjugated by something that lacks the verisimilitude needed to probe real depths in the people whose lives have been forever changed by war. Even the conclusion seems questionably resolved. (Grade: C-)
