Movie Review: Brothers

December 14, 2009
By Chuck Vinch, Army Times [Excerpts]

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 sisterin-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 an insurgent prisoner. When he returns with deep physical and psychological scars inflicted during his captivity, pre-existing family fault lines begin to quake with Richterscale 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.

GI Recommends the movie Brothers

From the editors: To protect the writer, ID has been removed from this email as published here. The Military Resistance organization, which produces Traveling Soldier, will follow up with the writer privately. We welcome other letters from members of the armed services. '

Thank you so much.

I recommend you & everyone else see the movie Brothers.

It is a very real depiction of how the military really works.

It also demonstrates what the leadership really thinks about lower enlisted.

Sincerely Grateful, [XXXX]

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