Film Review: Brothers (Director: Jim Sheridan)

Sometimes one encounters the opinion, there are no contemporary war films, that they more or less ended with Vietnam, that the only sort of war film is the one that goes back all the way to World War 2. The fact is, however, there are films about the wars of today, Iraq or Afghanistan. But it is also true that those that exist tend to be different from those of the past. The real war, they suggest, is going on at home, among those left behind or those coming back. The going home movie is nothing new, at least since Vietnam, its dominance with films like In the Valley of Elah or The Messenger is remarkable though. Brothers, Jim Sheridan's remake of Susanne Bier's 2004 film, belongs to that category.

The anonymity of modern warfare, the dominance of technology, combined with the guerilla strategy of the invisible enemy, may contribute to this. As does a changed public attitude towards war and those who fight it. We simply care more what happens when someone comes back, what happens to families, what war does to the society and to people at home.

Whatever the reason, Brothers is a coming home film that attempts not to shut out the reality of war. It's a strength and a weaknesse. Because it tries to explain what happens to Captain Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) when he comes back home by showing his suffering in Taliban captivity, the events at home lose some of there intensity. It makes it easier on the viewer when they are given cause and effect and little is left to the imagination. As long as the film goes back and forth between Afghanistan and America, both storylines tend to cancel each other out to some extense.

That's one aspect. The other is that the tranquility, the quiet boredom at home and the inhumane universe of the war contrast so strongly that it's hard to imagine they belong to the same world. It is this contrast that charges the return of the soldier presumed dead to the world that once was his home. There is a strong feeling that the protagonists of these two storylines, Cahill and his wife Grace (Natalie Portman), are no longer part of the same storyline. Even though the title suggests that this is mainly about Sam and his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), the black sheep of the family, freshly released from prison, it's Maguire's and Portman's characters Sheridan focuses on.

Coming home marks a break: Whereas before there has been a steady sense of development, the action now comes to a standstill. Even the camera hardly moves anymore as it zooms in on the protagonists' faces. Portman's, uncertain between love and happiness as well as fear and doubts, Tommy's, quiet, groping, questioning, but especially Sam's. Maguire's face is the one Sheridan allows to tell the story of the film: the serious yet warm, strict yet loving, focussed yet open face of the beginning turns into a mask, haunted, empty, paralysed.

The camera stays close, movements become so reduced it's almost a succession of still. As paralysis sets over that army town, almost all color is drained from it, pale, cold, lifeless colors depict a world of the living dead, a world of people with greyish skin who've forgotten how to be alive.

The change is subtle as the entire film is not one of big gestures. It's tiny things, a small wrinkle on the forehead, a slightly more widely opened eye, an almost invisibly tightened mouth which signal the change that has come - first over Sam, then the entire family. Sheridan is a master of reduction and he has a cast whose acting is so reduced it speaks louder than the grandest gesture could. Maguire is a revelation, Portman and Gyllenhaal match his motionless furor with a quiet intensity that is at times hardly bearable.

When the explosion comes it's almost a relief. Finally something happens, finally there is a chance for something to change. And so the film ends on just a hint of optimism, alsmost imperceptible but we feel it's there.