Brothers

Tagline: There are two sides to every family.

So I had wanted to see this since Natalie Portman and Jake Gyllenhaal are two of my favorite actors and the plot sounded interesting enough and both usually have good choices when it comes to choosing their roles. The film has grossed over $39 million worldwide and has met mixed reviews. It’s based on a Danish film of the same name and is also loosely drawn from Homer’s Odyssey.







The plot follows a military family of husband and wife Sam and Grace Cahill, Tobey Macguire and Natalie Portman, as Sam is deployed to Afghanistan. Soon, Sam is involved in a terrible helicopter crash and is presumed dead. As Grace deals with the death of her husband and father of her two small girls, she finds solace in Sam’s rebellious brother Tommy, Jake Gyllenhaal. He begins to take on the void left by Sam and bonds with the children and Grace in different ways. They form a relationship that almost crosses the line into a romantic level however suddenly news arrives that Sam has been found as a prisoner of war and is on his way home. He returns and is left to deal with the effects of his imprisonment has left on his mind and his family and he wrestles with a dark secret he feels he can tell noone.






The plot is obviously very dramatic and deals with several issues. The dialogue is well written and a part of the movie is reportedly ad-libbed. The characters are somewhat complex and develop somewhat throughout the movie but there is a lot going on in this mere 104 minutes and it’s hard to have a lot of complexity in such a short time with all the other actions going on in the movie. The plot is believable although it uses several stereotypes throughout. The characters seem to open up to one another very quickly even though each character is admittedly closed off from others which feels a little unnatural however I think this is due in part to the short runtime of the movie and not poor screenwriting or character development. I think there was too much time spent on the torture of Sam’s character although this might have been important to the director to visually show what he went through, but I think the same effect could have been captured simply by his physical appearance after he returns and the mystery of what really happened to him would have sufficed even better in my opinion if we weren’t showed exactly what happened to him. I think this would have given more time for the character development which was needed in this movie. It’s as though the director couldn’t decide if this was to be a drama about the relationships between this family or a war movie about imprisonment of US Soldiers and so he just spent an equal amount of time showing us both aspects of the story.






The movie was shot nicely and had fluent editing. It switched back and forth from the war scenes and family scenes with ease and was easy to follow. The movie had a nice pace although the beginning was a little jumpy and seemed to just dive headfirst into the action. The middle flowed much better with more time spend on the developing characters and the ending was also a little bit jumpy and rushed. I don’t think this was the result of poor editing but rather again due to the director trying to fit too much into too little time. The sound mixing was good and well done. The movie was mainly performance driven and therefore the cinematography held it’s own but wasn’t anything spectacular.






The three leads did well with their roles. Gyllenhaal and Portman did a great job giving their characters depth and developing the relationship between the two. Since the characters were not as complex as other roles they have undertaken, it wasn’t their best performances to date but they didn’t do a bad job. I didn’t really feel the chemistry between Portman and Maguire as they were supposed to be the loves of each other’s life but Maguire pulled off his detachment once he returned home with a superb performance and breakdown. He won a Golden Globe for his performance and he really did a good job with that aspect of the character. They just didn’t seem to quite pull off that they were a family in love in the beginning of the movie. I was interested to see Carey Mulligan’s role in the movie as she is definitely an actress I want to keep up with since I really enjoyed her performance in An Education, however her character was completely marginal and could have been completely cut out of the movie and actually in hindsight should have been in order to give the characters more time to develop onscreen. Not that she didn’t do a good job, but rather that the character was insignificant and she had such little screen time that it just didn’t make sense. In an interview, she reported that her whole scene was mostly ad-libbed which is interesting and shows that she’s got what it takes as an actress.






Overall, the movie was somewhat entertaining although horribly depressing. I really think the problem with the movie was the director wasn’t sure what message he wanted to send and therefore didn’t devote the right elements to the right parts of the movie. I think he needed to decide if he wanted to send a war message about the inadequate treatment for veterans and very specifically POWs upon their return home, or if he wanted to examine the family relationships in an extended family dealing with loss. The tagline reads ‘there are two sides to every family’ and so I would imagine he wanted to deal with the inter-familial relationships and therefore I would have rather seen either less scenes of the imprisonment of Maguire’s character or the runtime of the movie increased in order to allow for adequate development between the characters. If he wanted to make a movie with a political message, then I would have liked to see less of the relationship between Gyllenhaal and Portman while Maguire is gone and more time spent on how they all deal with his return from war. However overall, it wasn’t a waste of time and was at least entertaining although I felt super sad after this movie. I would recommend this to anyone who likes the three leads of the movie or maybe a military family themselves would enjoy this movie. It wasn’t a complete failure it just seemed like it was so close to pulling off a masterpiece and just missed it due to misdirection. ‘I don’t know who said that only the dead have seen the end of war? I have seen the end of war. The question is, can I go on living again?’ -- Brothers