Who’s In It: Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Sam Shepard, Mare Winningham, Carey Mulligan, Clifton Collins, Jr.
The Basics: A recently paroled man (Jake Gyllenhaal) grows close to his sister-in-law Grace (Natalie Portman) and her two young daughters when his brother Sam (Tobey Maguire) is presumed dead in Afghanistan. The troubled Tommy is such a natural at playing with his brother’s children (and with his gorgeous wife) that they form their own pretty little family unit, united in grief. So don’t blame Sam for going a little nuts when he comes home, alive and with just the teensiest bout of post-traumatic stress disorder, and thinks that his family has moved on without him…
What’s The Deal: I can see why Hollywood wanted to remake Suzanne Bier’s 2004 film Brodre, which plays out in similar fashion to Brothers except in Danish and with Gladiator hottie Connie Nielsen in Portman’s role: it’s easily translatable to American audiences, stars three attractive Hollywood A-Listers, and screams Oscar. Director Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father, In America) gets kudos for assembling a great cast, but the emotional pitch of Brothers reaches occasionally into soap opera-level histrionics – which, in a year that’s already given us the understated realism of war and post-war films like The Hurt Locker and The Messenger, feels a tad excessively melodramatic.
Just Emotion Taking Them Over: Actors love to emote. It’s how we know they’re acting. And so, every single person in the cast turns it up to eleven on the Angst-O-Meter: Gyllenhaal, Maguire, Sam Shepard, even the little girl who plays Sam and Grace’s daughter, Isabelle. Portman wins the furrowed-brow contest by spending half of the movie crying. She spends the other half looking like she’s about to cry, and about five minutes glowing in the bask of Gyllenhaal's smitten googly eyes.
Who’s Kind Of Great: Jake Gyllenhaal. I’m not one to swoon over the guy, and he does have some laughable character details (the neck tattoos tell you he’s been in prison). But Gyllenhaal makes Tommy so appealing that you wonder how Grace (or any newly single young mother) couldn’t fall for him. The hard-bitten black sheep of the family, he’s standoffish and brutish at first, but by the time he’s cavorting with his nieces on ice skates and fixing up Portman’s kitchen, I was in love. It’s a performance deserving of enough acting cred to carry Gyllenhaal into his much sillier next film. Bring on Prince Jake of Persia!
War Sucks, And Here’s Why: Brothers is sensitive to the toll that war takes on the home front, but the grief that comes with Sam’s reported death is nothing compared to the lasting effects of what he endures as a prisoner of sadistic insurgents. Despite his tendency to act by widening his eyes and not blinking (not to mention the harrowing but clichéd scenes in which he’s held captive and tortured), Maguire’s physical transformation from healthy and loving family man to gaunt, gun-wielding paranoid is one of the most disturbingly effective things about the film. Also effective: a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turn by It Girl Carey Mulligan, doing working-class American like she was born in the heartland as the distraught wife of a man captured with Sam in Afghanistan.