Brothers - He Ain't Heavy

Brothers, the new film by Jim Sheridan, director of My Left Foot and In America, could have been a powerful story if it had been told like it was in the preview. The preview leads you to believe that Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman have an affair while Portman's husband (and Gyllenhaal's brother), Tobey Maguire, is thought KIA in Afghanistan. This is not the case, and the film suffers because of it.

The story Brothers tells is largely from Maguire's perspective (He narrates certain sections.). He is a career military man, just like his father before him, and is a Captain in the Marines. He has a wife and two little girls, and feels largely out of place in civilian life, because all he knows how to do is be a soldier.

At the beginning of the film, he picks his low-life loser brother up from prison, out on parole for armed robbery. This is Gyllenhaal's character, tattooed up and cursing up a storm at any mention of what he's going to do with his life. Gyllenhaal and Maguire's father, a Vietnam vet (played by Sam Shephard), constantly boasts of his good son, Maguire, while bad mouthing Gyllenhaal, asking, "Why can't you be more like him?" The first quarter of the movie is this scene played over and over again, with Shephard saying the same thing, Maguire defending his brother, and Gyllenhaal storming out in anger.

Then Maguire is sent over to Afghanistan again, and his helicopter is shot down, and he is thought dead. News is delivered to Portman, and she breaks down. Her life is empty without him, and Gyllenhaal fills the gap. The script develops Gyllenhaal not as a slimy interloper, taking advantage of Portman and making ill advances, but as a kind presence, the cheerful big brother/uncle who tries to wipe the tears away by making a snowman with his nieces and taking everyone ice skating, by fixing up his sister-in-law's kitchen from the mess it is into a pristine white palace. He has lost just as much as they have - his guiding light, the brother who saved him from drowning when they were young, the brother who constantly pulled him out of whatever mess he was in, and kept forgiving him, pointing him back in the right direction, convinced he would find his way.

Eventually, we learn that Maguire is not dead, and is being held, along with a fellow soldier, in a POW camp in the mountains by vicious Taliban soldiers who execute a man right in front of them to show they mean business. They will eventually torture Maguire and the other soldier in an effort to get them to betray intelligence. These scenes of torture and suffering are intercut with Gyllenhaal and Portman's slow build to a romantic interlude, as Gyllenhaal continues to help Portman pull it together, and Portman begins the emotional journey of letting her husband go.

It is here that the movie slips up and becomes something less powerful than it should have been. Gyllenhaal and Portman only kiss, and never consummate their love affair. Then Maguire returns from the dead, and the story becomes about how he has been changed by war, fragmented into a paranoid, compulsive, disbelieving, tortured and violent man, lost to everything and everyone around him, and prone to creeping around his property at night, gun drawn, reacting to the neighbor's dog as if it were the Taliban back to retrieve what's left of him.

Since Gyllenhaal and Portman had only an innocent, fleeting moment together, which they both retreated from, there is no pressure on their part to feel guilt or regret. Therefore, the conflict lies exclusively with Maguire to stomp around and batter the new kitchen cabinets ("Do you know what these hands can do?"), and wave his gun around, and show the whites of his eyes. Maguire immerses himself in the role, and we are convinced of the torture he is going through, but it would have been a more powerful story, a more gut-wrenching and thought-provoking story, if Gyllenhaal and Portman had actually consummated their relationship, and were in love; If Gyllenhaal's nieces had accepted that their real father was gone, and Gyllenhaal was their new one; If Portman and company had laid Maguire to rest and started to build a new life, and were now forced to deal with not only his return, but the tortured, conflicted soul in need of the nurture and love they can no longer provide. But that's not what happens.

Brothers becomes about a crazy brother that everyone tries to keep under control before he kills himself and those around him. It could have been about that, and about so much more. Too bad, because there are scenes of real power here, as when Shephard apologizes to Gyllenhaal, seeing that his troubled son is a kind soul capable of charity and selflessness, or when Portman's oldest daughter refuses to put on the black dress for her father's funeral, and Portmans says, "We have to do this."

There is a scene toward the end that broke my heart, where Maguire, in a stand-off with the police, turns to his brother, pleading for help, and says, "I'm drowning, Tommy." If the whole movie had been like that ...