Brothers (2009): A Sturdy Premise, Softened by Warmth

Brothers landed in US theaters on December 4, 2009, on a Lionsgate release, with a $26 million budget and a tagline promising “two sides to every family.” It is a remake of Susanne Bier’s 2004 Danish film, and both pictures borrow from Homer’s Odyssey. Tobey Maguire plays USMC officer Sam Cahill, declared killed in action in Afghanistan, then rescued and sent home to a wife, two daughters and a brother who moved into the space he left behind. The film grossed $45 million. It drew mixed reviews, though Maguire’s work was singled out. It scored two Golden Globe nominations: Best Actor for Maguire and Best Original Song for “Winter,” performed by U2.

Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.

Sam Cahill’s Fourth Tour

The machinery is simple and sturdy. Sam ships out in 2007, leaving Grace, his high school sweetheart, with Isabelle and Maggie. His younger brother Tommy is out on parole after an armed robbery. At a family dinner, Hank Cahill insults Tommy for his criminal past and for failing to grasp his brother’s duty. Then Sam’s helicopter is shot down. He and Private Joe Willis survive the crash and are taken prisoner by the Taliban, but the US government declares them killed in action.

That false death is the hinge the whole film swings on, and Sheridan knows it.

Tommy Cahill at the Memorial

Tommy hears the news and berates Grace for letting Sam go. At the memorial service, Hank tries to drive Elsie and the girls home drunk; Tommy stops him, and Hank berates him again. Tommy accuses Hank of pushing Sam toward the Marines out of Hank’s own Vietnam War service. The film does not settle the question either way. Then Tommy does the harder thing. He tries to mend the relationship with his father. He apologizes to the bank teller he held at gunpoint. He bonds with Grace through his growing paternal connection to Isabelle and Maggie. Grace and Tommy kiss once, unwittingly, and go no further.

This middle stretch is where Brothers is most convincing, and it is also where the film gets soft. The apology to the teller happens off to the side, a single beat, when it might have been the spine of a whole second movie.

A Metal Pipe and a Lie to Cassie Willis

Meanwhile the captivity thread runs hot. Sam and Joe are tortured. Sam is eventually forced to beat Joe to death with a metal pipe. Months later Sam is rescued and comes home, and the film turns into a study of severe post-traumatic stress disorder. His daughters grow fearful and resentful. He lies to Joe’s widow, Cassie Willis, about how her husband died. His paranoia fixes on Grace and Tommy, and he convinces himself they fell in love while he was gone.

There are two sides to every family.

That line is the film’s tagline, not a line spoken in the picture.

The cast around Maguire is deep: Jake Gyllenhaal as Tommy, Natalie Portman as Grace, Sam Shepard as Hank, Mare Winningham as Elsie, Bailee Madison as Isabelle, Taylor Geare as Maggie, Patrick John Flueger as Joe Willis, Clifton Collins Jr. as Major Cavazos, Carey Mulligan as Cassie Willis, Omid Abtahi as Yusuf, Navid Negahban as Murad.

The Golden Globes and the U2 Song

The awards story is worth stating plainly, because it explains what the industry saw in this film. At the 67th Golden Globe Awards, Brothers picked up two nominations: Maguire for Best Actor, and “Winter,” performed by U2, for Best Original Song. A war drama with a $26 million budget and a $45 million gross does not usually get that kind of attention. Maguire’s nomination did.

A running order helps show where the film spends its weight.

Where Brothers Actually Stands

The film’s problem is not ambition. It is that Sheridan and his writers, David Benioff chief among them, keep choosing the tidier version of every scene. Sam’s beating of Joe to death is the moral crater at the center of the picture. The film stages it as a secret held back for a later reveal, and a reveal is not the same as an examination. Sam’s lie to Cassie Willis gets one scene and then the movie moves on. The paranoia about Grace and Tommy is the payoff the whole structure has been building toward, and it lands as a domestic argument rather than a catastrophe.

The performances hold. Maguire plays the return as a man wearing his own skin wrong, and the daughters’ fear of him is the film’s sharpest instrument. Gyllenhaal is asked to be decent and steady, and he is. Portman has the least written for her and does the most with it. Shepard gets the film’s best single idea, Tommy’s charge that Hank’s Vietnam service pushed Sam toward the Marines, and the script never follows it anywhere.

This is a remake, and it wants to be loved. It wants the audience to forgive Tommy, to pity Sam, to believe Grace held the line. That instinct is not wrong, but it costs the film its teeth. Bier’s 2004 film is the source; what Sheridan does with it is his own choice, and the choice is warmth.

What Brothers gets right is the premise: a death that turns out to be false leaves a household that already rebuilt itself around the hole. That is a real and terrible thing, and the film knows it. What it does not do is sit in the discomfort long enough to earn the ending it wants. The mixed reception was fair. Maguire’s nomination was fairer. The film is worth watching for him, for the middle act with the girls, and for one scene at a memorial service where a drunk father gets stopped in a driveway. Everything around those moments is competent and forgettable.

There is one more thing worth naming. The Odyssey borrowing is real, and both films take from it, but Brothers uses it as scaffolding rather than as a lens. A story about a soldier who comes home to find his house occupied by a rival is the oldest story in the western canon, and it has teeth because the rival is usually a stranger. Here the rival is a brother, which should make it worse and instead makes it sadder and smaller. That is the choice Sheridan made, and it is the reason the film lands as a family drama with a war in it rather than the reverse.

The film runs 105 minutes, which is lean for the amount of story it carries, and the compression shows most in the third act, where Sam’s unraveling gets the least room to work. A longer cut might have found the movie this one keeps almost being.

Brothers is a drama, a thriller and a war film by genre, and it is only ever fully one of those at a time. When it is a war film, in the crash and the captivity, it is grim and effective. When it is a thriller, in Sam’s suspicion of Grace and Tommy, it is thin. When it is a drama, around the dinner table and the memorial and the girls, it is the best version of itself.

5.8 of 10.

Brothers 2009 · Jake Gyllenhaal · Jim Sheridan · movie review · Natalie Portman · Tobey Maguire