February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The film opens with a farewell dinner for Captain Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire), a veteran of several tours of duty in the Afghan conflict, who is about to return there with his unit. Sam’s send-off is attended by his loving family, among them ne’er do well younger brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), just out of jail, and not entirely welcome at the table. Sam’s kids quickly let their uncle know that their mom Grace (Natalie Portman) can’t stand him. Their grandfather Hank (Sam Shephard) ups the ante after a few whiskeys too many, to let his feckless younger son know he’s a disgrace to the family compared to the older boy Sam.
Tommy more than lives up to these insults after his brother leaves for war. He goes on drunken binges, expecting his sister-in-law to bail him out when he’s in trouble despite the fact that she is struggling to manage two kids on her own. But shocking news of Sam’s apparent death in a helicopter crash spurs a change in Tommy, who becomes a model uncle and wins the respect of Grace and her children. Even his dad begrudgingly tones down his drink-fuelled zingers.
A further shocking soon follows as Sam turns up alive — a surprise for the family only, as we cinemagoers have been primed for this return from the dead after three weeks of watching the movie preview. Held prisoner in the Afghan Pamir Mountains following the Black Hawk crash, he escapes to return home physically frail but mentally devastated by his ordeal at the hands of the Taliban. The erosion of his humanity by months of captivity leave him ill-equipped to deal with a reshaped household in which everyone seems much happier with his brother than they are with him, and his family soon realizes they have to deal with the war a lot closer to home than they had bargained for.
In a film that cashes in all it surprises in the trailer, the real value is in watching Jim Sheridan’s skilled ensemble cast deal with the personal devastation of warfare: first with the unthinkable, death in battle, and then something even worse, a live return as a psychotic train wreck. Tobey Maguire, in his horrific descent from model solider to loose cannon, manifests an intensity unimaginable in the role with which he is most closely indentified, that of consummate square Peter Parker in the “Spider Man” series, but more than hinted at in his performance in “The Good German.”
Jake Gyllenhaal’s mirror-opposite transformation from reprobate to responsible adult provides an impressive foil to the troubled older brother, as Tommy thaws the no-nonsense sister-in-law who never liked him. The growing anxiety that makes Sam dangerous on his return, that their warmer relations might have led to an affair, is countered by the understated affinity between the putative lovers, and the film is the better for it. Indeed, the quasi-romance between the black sheep and the goody-two-shoes ex-cheerleader seems less likely to lead to fireworks in the bedroom than slippers and cocoa by the fireside.
Sam Shephard’s powerful cameo as the gruff paterfamilias, himself a Vietnam vet, fuels the family arguments about duty, valour and honor, and Natalie Portman shines as the stoic but long-suffering army wife. As is often the case in Sheridan films, special mention goes to the child performers, in this instance Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare, playing the kids who blurt the truths that the adults dare not address.
“Brothers” covers some of the same ground as Vietnam-based “Coming Home” and “The Deerhunter,” but has additional resonance in that it tackles a war that is not alone still being waged, but is about to escalate after eight years of bloodshed. Rated R for strong language and brutal violence, “Brothers” is currently playing in New York theatres, and nationwide.