Reeling: "Brothers"
Posted on 17. Dec, 2009 by Jef in Film, Reeling
Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal in "Brothers"
Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, and Jake Gyllenhaal — this is quite the collection of gigantic glassy eyes we’ve got going here. Big eyes, big heads, small bodies. All three actors have always played young to me, and — with the exception of Gyllenhaal in a few of his performances — have been hard to swallow as adults with adult problems. In Brothers, directed by Jim Sheridan, it is at least satisfying to see Maguire and Portman join Gyllenhaal in trying out more mature material — three of My Generation’s actors growing up and into themselves onscreen. Unfortunately the project just doesn’t work.
Maguire plays Capt. Sam Cahill, a tightly-wound soldier who gets sent to Afghanistan on yet another tour but doesn’t come home alive — at least not when expected. Portman plays the captain’s wife, Grace, and Gyllenhaal his brother, Tommy, who try to move on with their lives after the news of Sam’s death. Grace has a messy kitchen and two daughters. Tommy has a life in shambles after a recent prison bid.
Gyllenhaal wells the depths of his impressive eyebags here, and he’s great as the misunderstood loner, the disaffected son. His good-lookingness is somewhat odd but true, he’s got that dirty unkempt thing going on but minus the hipsterims; he’s no Mark Ruffalo, disrupting everything with sheepishness (intentional or not — I got love for Ruffalo). He looks right at home drinking his days away on a barstool or fixing a kitchen with his working-class homies. He’s great in the film but too bad the film isn’t great to his character.
As Tommy grows more attached to Grace in Sam’s absence, their relationship grows quickly and believably from disdain to grudging responsibility, to finally almost-romance. They go too far during a weeded-out moment of weakness, but unfortunately that’s also as far as Brothers is willing to develop their individual stories, which is especially disappointing in the case of Gyllenhaal, who crashes fast from fascinating to oh-yeah-he’s-in-this-too. After their flame gets voluntarily snuffed, the couple is forced back into the role of side characters, blinking and frowining and screaming around the actions of Sam.
Sam, for his part, is built around cliches, however true these things may play out in real life — he’s a soldier’s soldier; he’s the good son; he refuses to buckle under torture; he builds up a list of regrets in Afghanistan that haunt him when he returns home. Give Maguire props for making pre-Afghanistan Sam and post-Afghanistan Sam one continuous characterization. A lesser actor would have flipped the Mr. Hyde switch, but Maguire is for the most part subdued, and all the more affecting because of it. The tendons in his neck are perma-flexed, his wide eyes even wider, and the ropey muscles snaked around his arms — so different from the Lautner-lite physique he sports in his Spider-Man films — are just as frightening as the gun he waves around in paranoia.
But despite it all, the three stars still look like kids in a movie about adults. It’s possible this is intentional — war is fought by children — but the thing that should tie this all in together as a tidy package is missing. Brothers sort of forgets its title and it ends up not being about a broken relationship between Sam and Tommy, or even however broadly about the Band of Brothers that we celebrate briefly as war heros then conveniently forget about when their traumas become burdensome. Or if it is about those things, it’s not about them in any noteworthy way.
I haven’t seen it, but I’ve read that the original Danish film Brødre is more harrowing and rough around the edges. Lacking anything concrete to say other than the obvious, Brothers probably could have used some of that gritty camera work — as it is it’s drab, and that’s all it is.
