Chattanooga Pulse

The film director Stanley Kubrick once said, “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”  He was right, but it seems as though filmmakers of late prefer to tweak Kubrick’s phraselet to say, “If it can be re-written or re-thought, it can be re-filmed.”  All these remakes of horror films (The Last House on the Left, Halloween 2), action films (The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3) and comedies (Chris Rock’s “urban remake” of the British comedy Death at a Funeral is in the works) prove that we’re no longer comfortable with originality because, darn it, originality just takes too much work.

The new film Brothers is the most current example of this.  A tense melodrama pining for a couple of Oscar statuettes, Brothers is a retread of a better Danish film with the same title.  It stars Natalie Portman as Grace Cahill, a grieving wife and mother of two who believes her Marine husband Sam (Tobey McGuire) has been killed overseas in a helicopter crash.  In her anguish, her husband’s brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) tries to comfort her and the two find solace—if only for a moment—in each other’s lonely embrace.

Sam and Tommy’s father Hank (Sam Shepard) is a Vietnam vet whose face and demeanor have been worn and tarnished by time and too much alcohol.  Sam was his father’s beloved son, the athlete, the socialite, the strong man, while Tommy usually slipped into the background unnoticed.  The first time we see Sam, he is leading a troop of Marines into the fray; our first glimpse of Tommy is a straggling drunk returning a car he borrowed without asking.

It is eventually brought to light that Sam is not dead and that he was held captive by rebels in Afghanistan, forced to do inhumane things known only to him.  He returns home a miserable shell of a man, unsure of himself and worried that Tommy has been sleeping with his wife.

After seeing how comfortably Tommy interacts with Grace and the two young daughters, he tells his brother that all can be forgiven.  “You thought I was dead,” he says, but it is clear that the crux of his paranoia comes from unstoppable thoughts of the passion that may have occurred between his brother and his wife.  From here, Brothers is a tightly wound ball of dread that begins to unravel piece-by-piece, moment-by-moment.

There is one scene in particular that epitomizes this best.  A little while after Sam’s return, the whole family is gathered around the dinner table celebrating a birthday.  The two little girls wear party hats, Sam and Grace sit across from each other, Hank is at the head, and in an attempt to offset his attraction to Grace, Tommy has brought a talkative, sexy blond he met an hour before.  The blond enjoys talking about herself, voicing her opinions about how the military works and how people in the armed forces should be treated.

All the emotion pent up in Brothers thus far—the fractured relationships between father and son, husband and wife, parent and child—here begins to spill out like bees from a flaming hive.  The scene climaxes in a moment of unexpected terror when one of the little girls becomes so angry that she makes the pronouncement that her mother would rather sleep with Uncle Tommy than Sam.

It’s a terrifying scene and it recalls the most memorable aspect of the original Danish film: complete reliance on actors to move the drama along.  No music, no fancy camera work—just raw acting.

Director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In America) isn’t afraid of this in the most dramatic scenes, but he does fall prey in other moments to temptations that go hand-in-hand with transferring the modern European film aesthetic, with its cold tones and quiet reflection, to the American multiplex.   There are goofy supporting characters to provide comic relief from all the grief, a music montage, and bookended narration from Sam just to make sure that we fully understand that life is tough.

Though the script is nimble on an interpersonal level and there are some robust moments, as a whole, Brothers seems an attempt to fashion an infinitely complex piece of source material into something accessible for the lowest common denominator.  It all seems lazy in the end—and no amount of good acting can make up for that.

Brothers
Directed by Jim Sheridan
Starring Natalie Portman, Tobey McGuire, Jake Gyllenhaal
Rated R
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes