Brothers (Saturday, December 5, 2009) (184)

There have recently been a bunch of movies about the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their effect on American servicemen. The Hurt Locker, The Messenger and Brothers are just three of them, each one telling a slightly different story. In this one, two brothers, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire, are essentially opposites. Jake is a ne'er-do-well who is getting out of jail for an armed robbery as the movie opens. He is not married, has no girlfriend, seems to drink and mess around a lot and works odd construction jobs. Tobey is an officer in the Marines, has a beautiful wife (Natalie Portman) and two adorable daughters.

Tobey is sent back to Afghanistan on another tour and while there gets shot down in his helicopter and taken captive by a Taliban/insurgent group. The military, thinking he died in the crash, tells his family that he is dead and they have a funeral for him. Soon enough, Jake starts spending more and more time with Natalie and the girls and really cleans his life up over a period of a few months, becoming a father-figure to the girls. All of this happiness turns into problems when Tobey is rescued from his captors and returns home. There he finds a family who has been thinking he is dead, but still loves him. He suffers from debilitating PTSD and has to figure out how to continue life as he knew it.

Throughout the film, the acting is generally pretty solid. Jake and Natalie are very good and are very convincing in the fact that they're sexually drawn to one another, but know that they shouldn't screw around. Sam Shepard beautifully plays the guys' father - a conservative old man who fought in Vietnam and clearly loves Tobey more than Jake because of his military service. As Shepard does in almost all his roles, he seems to live in the role in such a complete way that it's hard to imagine he is not like this off-screen as well (though I'm sure he is not).

Tobey's performance is more troubling. As the movie opens, he is a sweet but serious military man who loves his daughters and his wife. When he comes back from his tour he is totally shell shocked and a shadow of who he used to be. Initially I was very impressed by his 'thousand-yard stare' (which really looked like historical pictures of men returning from the trenches in World War I) and the emptiness he seemed to show on his face with his big, emotionless eyes. After awhile, though, it felt to me like he was going too far with this. In the climactic scene, I think he over-does the deep sadness and terror he feels. He seems more erratic than he should be and it feels like he's really acting, rather than the easy naturalness the other actors have. On top of this, he has a very severe military buzz cut hairdo, which makes him look more deranged than he would be normally.

The script is rather recycled and trite, but not loathsome. I never felt like I was watching a story I had not seen before, but I also didn't hate what I was seeing. I think the story is very front-heavy (as seen in the long synopsis above) and seems that it's generally flat until the last 20 minutes. Still, the treatment of the difficult family, with a rigid father and a screw-up brother, is done very well.

I think the treatment of the veteran soldiers who come back as crumpled men (and women) is very respectful and interesting. The psychology of the family, who thinks he's dead and movies on, but then has to turn around and love him as a living man again, is interesting. His repose to the relationship he perceives between his wife and brother, feels a bit extreme, but is definitely understandable.

I guess the biggest problem with the whole film is that there are a bunch of interesting moments (between the two brothers, between the brothers and the father, between Jake and Natalie, between Natalie and Tobey when he returns from the war) but they don't tie together well. It almost feels like it could have been an episodic television show about a middle-American family, where each scene is a different episode.

Stars: 2 of 4