The American cinema continues to worry at and about the effects of the United States’s foreign wars on the national psyche, or at least the psyches of some of those involved. We’ve already had In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, Stop-Loss, and (unseen here) Brian DePalma’s Redacted — notably, Hollywood is tackling the issue of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions far more quickly than it tackled Vietnam.
Now we have Brothers, about the shocks a family has to absorb and the adjustments it has to make when one of its members goes missing in Afghanistan. It’s the latest entry in the sub-genre noted above, and at first it feels like a very American film, though of more serious intent and better quality than the usual commercial dross, despite its being directed by an Irishman, Jim Sheridan (who made My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father).
Yet it turns out to be based on a Danish film of the same name (Brødre in Danish), and from what one can discover it follows the original very closely. I wondered when I saw the screen credit mentioning Brødre whether the storyline had been transposed from one war to another — in which war has Denmark been involved in living memory? But both deal with the Afghan adventure; I’d forgotten, if I ever knew, that there were Danes in Afghanistan. Still, it transposes very well to the American scenario.
The brothers in question are the traditional opposites. Sam (Tobey Maguire) is a soldier, a dutiful patriot doing service in the army, while Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the black sheep: as the movie opens, he is just coming out of jail for a vaguely specified crime. At the subsequent dinner, which is naturally riven with tensions, we meet the older members of the family. There’s dad (Sam Shepard), himself an old and somewhat jingoistic soldier, who carries some resentment towards his younger jailbird son. (He’s a Vietnam vet, making an interesting connection that isn’t much explored.) There’s his wife Elsie — it’s not clear that she is in fact the mother of Sam and Tommy; it seemed not, as far as I could see. And then of course there’s Sam’s lovely wife Grace (Natalie Portman) and their two young daughters, whom we have first encountered in the introductory passages.
When Sam leaves for Afghanistan and goes missing, presumed dead, the family’s internal dynamics shift, causing a new set of tensions and fears. Tommy, for one, begins to find ways to make reparation for his past sins, or, at any rate, to find a purpose he had hitherto lacked, but that will in turn set off a new train of troublesome events.
In this respect, Brothers is a powerfully involving story of family relationships as well as a tale of the kinds of trauma that war can visit upon people (and that’s just the Americans — never mind the Afghans, who are here shown as relentlessly evil). The two brothers, and the contrasts between them as well as the different forms their transformations take, are at the centre of the story, but the knock-on effects of the situation are perhaps most deeply felt in the remarkably resonant depictions of the two little girls, played with preternatural sensitivity by Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare.
There is some viewer distraction in this. At moments one is almost thrown out of the movie’s story, wondering how filmmakers get the little actors to do these things with such finesse at such a tender age. Their complex reactions to the absence of their father, their evolving attitudes to Uncle Tommy, and their own dyadic relationship — all these are beautifully done, and the kind of commentary this provides on the adult dynamics going on around them gives the film a depth and resonance lacking in most such portrayals of the child’s-eye view, where innocence tends to be taken for granted, or is overstated in a perky, twinkly manner that one can’t help feeling doth protest too much.
One shot in Brothers, in which the camera lingers with inquisitive tenderness on one girl’s face as it changes expression, mutates and intimates tears, is worth a thousand icky kiddie shots in a thousand other mainstream movies.
The adage has it that grown-up actors should beware of acting with children or animals, but the grown-ups in Brothers hold their own very admirably against this junior competition. Portman shows with each new film she makes that she is much more than the ridiculously attired but otherwise character-free Queen Padme of the later Star Wars extravaganzas. Here, she seems to be living very convincingly on an emotional hair trigger, and she makes one feel strongly for Grace. Maguire, in turn, demonstrates that he is not just a cutesy Spider-Man; his bug-eyed wastedness may feel a bit too self-consciously actorly in places, but overall it works. Shepard, as the crusty old warrior dad, adds a series of what one might call grace notes.
Gyllenhaal, though, is the most powerful presence here. Jittery and still rebellious when Tommy first comes out of jail, not fully in control of his responses, he lets the character develop subtly and strongly into something rounded and sympathetic. His trajectory is more complex, certainly, than brother Sam’s, where the shocks are more in-your-face. In a film aiming for understated realism, with the attendant risk of a slight diffusion of effect, Gyllenhaal holds it all together.
Another risk of this kind of realism is that if the movie ties itself up too neatly in the end we suddenly feel the pressure of an overdetermined script — and we’ve all had that experience at the movies many, many times. It’s irksome and can undermine all the good work done by the foregoing narrative. The counter-risk is that if the movie echoes real life all too naturalistically and leaves too many bits and pieces unresolved we, as viewers, will feel cheated and unsatisfied, as though the film didn’t in fact end when the final credits rolled — it just stopped. This is perhaps the key paradox of realist aesthetics.
Brothers tends towards the second option, as befits its obvious agenda, and in that it may be most commendable. Still, it did feel, to me at least, that having set up the narrative situation so well, and having then developed it masterfully, with very few and very minor missteps, it wasn’t sure quite where to go in its final act. The big-bang resolution is avoided — but a bomb has, metaphorically, gone off anyway, and we’re left with shards and the detritus of the aftermath.