Film review: ‘Brothers’ - Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

Film review: ‘Brothers’

A hard-charging Marine officer goes down in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan and is presumed dead. He leaves a beautiful, loving wife, two adorable little girls — and a younger brother just out of jail, the latest misstep in a life spent as his family’s delinquent, black-sheep shadow.

But the younger brother finds an inner reserve of untapped responsibility and steps into the void, helping his widowed sister-in-law with home repairs, with mentoring the girls — and eventually, with a little bit more.

Then comes news that the officer is very much alive and coming home after months as a prisoner of insurgents. When he returns with deep physical and psychological scars inflicted during his captivity, pre-existing family fault lines begin to quake with Richter-scale intensity.

Sounds like fodder for a typically maudlin matinee on the Lifetime Movie Network. But “Brothers,” a remake of a 2004 Danish film, is much more.

It’s also much less — and that’s meant as a compliment. Director Jim Sheridan and screenwriter David Benioff don’t preach or moralize, but rather stick to a spare, minimalist key to lead a remarkably tight-knit ensemble through an intensely evocative humanist study of a wartime family at war with itself.

The cast is awesome. Tobey Maguire as Sam, the officer, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Tommy, his younger bro, obliterate their heretofore fully justified profiles as soft, marshmallowy actors.

In fact, Maguire is flat-out ferocious as a grunt rushing headlong toward oblivion out of deep guilt over a horrific atrocity his captors forced him to commit after months of deprivation and torture in Afghanistan.

As Grace, the woman caught between the brothers, Natalie Portman nails the emotional maelstrom of a young wife and mother who thought she was widowed and then wasn’t.

The great Sam Shepard also lends his talents as the boys’ father, a hard-drinking Vietnam veteran with issues of his own.

For all the weighty emotions swirling on screen, Sheridan and Benioff maintain a believable tone that never feels sappy or overwrought; Grace and Tommy, for example, succumb to only one moment of weakness — a single brief kiss that leaves both feeling saddened and guilty.

That proves to be enough to light the slow-burning fuse on the family powder keg. It all leads up to a harrowing scene that starts with Sam lining up kitchen glassware in perfectly ordered rows during a late-night OCD binge and builds to a peak that is as raw as anything I’ve seen at the octoplex in recent years.

It had the crowd at my screening holding its collective breath, and actually left me a bit shaken — not something you’ll often hear me say about a movie.

And therein lies a conundrum for military audiences.

It’s easy to appreciate the high level of technical craft at work here. But the subject matter may hit unnervingly close to home for troops, their families and friends who already are painfully aware of the emotional toll wrought by eight years of multiple combat deployments.

On the other hand, for the many Americans who remain only dimly aware that their nation is at war, and the many others whose idea of wartime sacrifice extends no further than slapping a “support the troops” magnet on their fat-bottomed SUVs, “Brothers” should be mandatory viewing.

Rated R for violence, language, mature themes. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.