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Jim Sheridan with Jake Gyllenhaal & Tobey
Maguire
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In the taut, heartbreaking,
emotionally truthful new family at war drama from Irish director Jim Sheridan (My
Left Foot/In America), two brothers, Sam and Tommy Cahill are
sitting at a New Mexico ice rink. Sam, has followed their mean drunk of a dad
straight into the substitute family of the United States Marine Corps – as we
watch him Sam, his boyish countenance haggard from an unnatural weight loss,
experienced on a fourth hitch in Afghanistan – is perched close to black sheep
brother, Tommy. As the men converse barely above a whisper, Sam can see his
gorgeous wife, Grace, and his two lovely daughters cavorting blissfully on the
ice. Moments before Sam had watched Tommy skating carefree with Grace and the
kids. The sight of this prompts Sam to ask a question no brother dare ask
another.
“Did you fuck her? I’d understand.”
“What makes you think so?”
“You look so comfortable together.
You’ve got to tell me.”
Brothers, was adapted by
David Benioff from Danish filmmakers Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas
Jensen’s Brodre, a role reversal drama where the dutiful son is left
maddened by unspeakable war experiences while the “fuck-up” thrives in his
absence, metaphorically stealing the affections of wife and kinder with an
indiscrete kiss and lots of hands on daddy time.
In Brothers, Maguire’s Sam
is, at first, the model citizen: bathing his daughters with affection,
overlooking his ill-tempered dad (the whiskey fueled Sam Shepard acing a role that
might have belonged to Robert De Niro prior to the latter’s descent into cinema
geezer-hood), picking newly paroled Tommy from the state slammer and leaving
Grace (the peerless Natalie Portman) a final love letter, to be opened only upon
his death. Back in Afghanistan with “his men,” things spin out of control when
his chopper is shot down and he and a young private are captured by a murderous
Taliban unit.
Back home the premature news of
Sam’s death leaves a new daddy in charge: misfit Tommy seizes his chance,
providing Grace a more dependable shoulder to lean on (and dangerously more)
while giving the girls “an uncle” who’s more there for them than war obsessed,
part-time dad, Sam.
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When the new domestic order is
toppled by the unexpected return of an emaciated and crazed in the eyes Sam –
Maguire masterfully morphs between saint and demon, his deep pool eyes
registering every imaginable act – their own possible destruction at the hands
of their clearly crazy father is immediately grasped by his daughters, like
canaries in the coal mine. The showdown we simultaneously long for and dread is
neatly forestalled, Sheridan craftily leaves the human bomb ticking through a
child’s birthday party, slowly turning up the flame as Sam is brought to a boil
by a child’s playing with her food, another irritatingly running her hands over
a balloon, all the while Tommy’s instant new girlfriend – An Education’s Carey
Mulligan – delivers the film’s nuanced message about the inevitable toll of
post-traumatic shock, in a freshly-minted all-American girl accent.
When Sam finally blows it’s up to
Grace and Tommy to symbolically reconfigure this damaged clan’s DNA and avert
an array of deadly fates: maddened Marine slaughters family and self or suicide
by cop.
In Brothers Tobey Maguire as
Sam and Jake Gyllenhaal as Tommy unlock the secret of how to lure a mass
audience into weighing the real costs of America’s never ending “War on Terror”
through a powerful mix of naked if severely flayed
flesh and souls dangerously close to seeing death as a
kinder fate. Tommy tells the dad he blames for Sam’s never-ending mission that
he would gladly slit his throat to bring Sam back intact. Later Tommy will
scream out at a squad of trigger happy cops, “Back off, this is a family
matter, we’re brothers.”
Tobey and Jake are cinema prophets
in the United States of Amnesia, where it’s okay to discuss anything so long as
it doesn’t threaten family, flag or our infernal pursuit of money and careers.
By the late 70’s when Hollywood found its voice on Vietnam – Coming Home, The
Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now – the fighting was over and the herd had moved
on. The vets who desperately tried to make sense of their experience either
shaped up or turned into the loony tunes homeless guys who are just now
reaching their
final state of forgetting.