Earn This

Rating: two and a half stars (out of four)

Painted with a hunched sensitivity, somehow avoiding melodrama but nevertheless evincing other damaging flaws, Brothers almost manages to succeed by doing basically nothing.  This is a tremendously delicate film, low on plot and heavy on pondering, and one that acts as though it’s afraid to ever get to its core issues.  You’ll probably leave it trying to figure out if it’s as profound as it purports to be.

Remaking a Danish film from all of 4 years ago, Brothers will likely remind some of Pearl Harbor (not usually a good thing) with the love triangle that (sort of) develops between its three leads.  Soldier Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) prepares for another duty in Afghanistan as the film opens; meanwhile, his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) has just been released from prison.  Sam’s doting wife Grace (Natalie Portman) tries to reassure their young kids, while the brothers’ father (Sam Shepard) generally beams at Sam and scowls at Tommy.  After Sam is presumed dead abroad, Tommy starts helping out Grace with child-rearing and general house maintenance, quickly abandoning the bad boy persona about which we never really learned much anyway.  A hint of a romance ignites just in time for Sam’s return home, at which point he—of course—is ‘never the same.’

On paper this sounds painfully overwrought, but, to its credit, Brothers never feels that way.  I observed several scenes, especially towards the beginning, that could have very easily delved into melodrama and kept their toes short of that line.  The story even surprised me a few times, especially in what happens between Tommy and Grace and in its rather abrupt and unconventional ending.  Behind the boards is director Jim Sheridan, who (granted, with substantial help from Daniel Day-Lewis) made the excellent films In the Name of the Father and The Boxer (and the respectable My Left Foot), and even where David Benioff’s script leaves gaps, Sheridan’s too committed to the material to give up.

That said, too many knots formed in my mind when I approached admiration afterwards.  First and foremost, I couldn’t get past the idea that every single character fits nicely and tidily into his or her Hollywood box.  There’s the black sheep brother who immediately redeems himself when necessary, the devoted son turned wounded soldier, the emotionally distant and slightly alcoholic father whose feelings for his kids couldn’t be more dichotomous, the grieving widow—and these eye-role-inducing stereotypes extend all the way down to the overly cute children who say things that ones of their age would never, ever utter.

These simplicities keep the film from achieving liftoff.  The set-up, since it’s handled with compassion, inspires interest.  It looks wonderful, with warm and pretty cinematography.  But there’s something distinctly missing.  In its rush to avoid melodrama, Brothers doesn’t achieve drama.  The questions surfacing between the three main characters don’t ever really get addressed, by themselves or anyone else.  The film lacks momentum, spending too much time on meandering scenes with the children that don’t go anywhere.  That surprising last scene is fine, by itself, but by that point, you’ll already be looking at the screen with your head turned a little to the side, like a slightly confused puppy.

Because the characters aren’t deep enough, because we don’t sense that Grace and Tommy really have any regrets about whatever happened between them, the threads don’t hold together.  To wit: the not insignificant amount of time paid to Sam’s time in Afghanistan suggests that this subplot must have an intrinsic purpose to the story, must amplify the primary storyline.  Over there, he did something terrible that he regrets and struggles to live with—a state of mind that, one might assume, he can share with the other two characters.  But that’s not really true of them, or at least we never believe that it is.  Despite the vague suggestions of pervasive family turmoil, Grace and Tommy never convince us that they’re particularly regretful or disturbed by any of the turn of events.  That leaves Sam, dangling on his own, possessor of a tangential subplot that doesn’t connect him to the rest of the film as much as it should. 

The actors all reside in the ‘competent’ range, clearly not helped by the thin characterizations.  Portman has done this ‘heartbreakingly sad’ this before (Cold Mountain), and that’s fine, but I couldn’t help wondering throughout the film how much things would have been better with Leonardo DiCaprio as Sam.

All of this said, I don’t have a large problem with Brothers, since you’d be surprised at how few contemporary Hollywood films try to make you think.  But whereas Pearl Harbor beat its love/betrayal storyline to death with embarrassing dialogue, this movie tentatively tiptoes around everything, genially and quietly presenting three well-meaning characters that you might not mind thinking about for a few hours, level of profoundness demonstrated being up to you to decide.

Legendary musician and producer Brian Eno once said, “Every review should have, below the name of the critic, their 10 current favorite works in the medium.  That way you have some chance of seeing their prejudices.”  Well said, sir.  To that end, I proffer my ten favorite movies, not currently but all-time.  I present this list with the conditions that I know there are countless intriguing movies I have not seen—particularly any made before the last decade—and that my tastes continue to shift.

1) Mystic River

Joy Division set to cinema—the most ferociously intense, haunting movie I’ve ever seen.  Mystic River speaks, above all, to the different ways people cope with grief (just as JD did).  The characters in this movie try everything possible to lead productive lives that have been wrecked by tragedy, and though some succeed more than others, they all tell us something about what it means to be human.  As a murder mystery is investigated, questions, desires, and regrets that have lain dormant between three old friends are unearthed.

Clint Eastwood imparts a brooding, plaintive feel upon the action, understanding how atmosphere can enhance, but not overpower a story, and he culls exceptional work from his actors.  Tim Robbins’s command of a wide and rapidly shifting range of emotions is nothing short of stunning, and the incomparable Sean Penn triumphs even all of his other performances.  Yet it’s Kevin Bacon who speaks the film’s truest and most heartbreaking lines, in a late scene with Penn that might be the most emotive scene I’ve ever seen in a movie.  The best art speaks universally and personally at the same time, and in Mystic River, everything feels connected to my life, no matter what’s going on in it at the time.

2) Closer

Closer uses four spectacularly dysfunctional relationships to make profound statements about more reasonable and, hopefully, more common ones.  Asking questions most movies don’t want to touch, it makes articulate observations of the relationships among its four characters applicable to our everyday lives.  The actors and script each evince their extraordinary skill by quietly showing us that, behind the characters’ betrayals and brutal words lie a vast expanse of pain and hurt—even if they don’t want to admit they’re feeling those things.

Closer has a reputation for being depressing, but since everyone gets what he or she deserves, I see it more as a warning than a suicide pill.  It’s not really about the loneliness that touches everyone in it.  It’s about how much people who have been hurt in the past are willing to risk again, how much a failure to resist sexual attraction taints one’s character, and whether any relationship can succeed without significant flaws.

3) Good Will Hunting

An unfailingly sincere movie, and thus one that is quite easy for the sarcastic and ironic to mock.  Yet the sincerity in this movie carries along with it some implosive drama.  Matt Damon and Robin Williams give career-best performances as, respectively, a math genius whose life is going nowhere yet is frequently on edge, and the worn-down therapist who helps him connect with what’s important.  The riveting final third of the film, featuring sparkling scenes between these two as well as the other side characters, is everything it should be: provocative, intelligent, assertive, well-acted, and always very real.

4) Saving Private Ryan

The reputation of Steven Spielberg’s epic, set during World War II, precedes it, but the hype is all worth it.  The famous opening 20 minutes of war footage will leave you wishing your heart rate would subside even while your eyes are spellbound to the screen—it’s unimaginable, chaotic, and easy to follow all at once—but the movie truly becomes great with the way it handles the rest of its story with such humanity.  As eight men, led by Tom Hanks’s John Miller, search for one missing soldier, writer Robert Rodat imbues a philosophical tone upon the material, raising questions about fighting that are not easily answered.  Finding Ryan isn’t the point; the point is what Miller’s men think about it, what Miller does while executing the mission, and what Ryan says when told he can return home.

5) Children of Men

Lead actor Clive Owen has an affinity for playing characters who derive strength from destruction occurring around them (Closer, Croupier), but here it is the rest of the world that has fallen apart while he ultimately finds a measure of decency and redemption.  Showing us what would happen in a world with no children, the explosive Children of Men uses mature filmmaking to study the human condition.  In the jaw-dropping final ten minutes, as hope intermingles with despair and Owen looks towards the future, the film achieves an emotional resonance few can in their entire running time.

All the touches from the hand of director Alfonso Cuaron, who also co-wrote the screenplay, have a revelatory effect.  Even when you don’t think he’s doing something, he is.  Sean Penn himself said the movie “is arguably as well-directed a picture as there’s ever been.”  I can’t give it any higher praise than that.

6) Garden State

A quirky, unconventionally smart film written and directed by star Zach Braff, Garden State captures 21st century ennui perfectly.  Braff plays Andrew, an emotionally blank, marginally successful actor who’s drawn home for the first time in 9 years with the news of his mother’s death.  There, he meets old friends who aren’t much more productive with their lives yet still enjoy it—something he’s forgotten about—and one special new one, played by Natalie Portman.

Culling strong performances from Portman and Peter Sarsgaard, Braff constructs an often hilarious and always touching portrait of 20something loneliness.  The film has tiny flaws, but Braff deserves praise for his underlying message that being able to feel something is better than avoiding pain.  As he tells his father, “We may not be as happy as you always dreamed we would be, but for the first time let’s just allow ourselves to be whatever it is that we are…and that’ll be better.”

7) A Beautiful Mind

What’s more important in life, truth or beauty?  That question forms the heart of A Beautiful Mind, the story of the life of brilliant and troubled mathematician John Nash.  The film explores the head, heart, and psyche of its character with an excellent script given even more depth by Russell Crowe’s superb lead performance.  The film is both taut and comprehensive, avoiding becoming another rote biopic that merely sketches biographic details by letting us into Nash’s world and that of his closest friends.

Cast Away

Like Children of Men, Cast Away takes a simple but devastating hook and uses that, and its symbolic main character, to make profound and poignant statements about human nature and the world at large.  After being marooned by a plane crash, Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) faces a deserted island and little chance of ever seeing the real world and his fiancée Kelly again.  The film speaks to the ability of the human spirit to motivation itself to action even when all seems hopeless, but it is defined by its final act, after Chuck returns home to see how life has changed for everyone else while he was away.

His scene with Helen Hunt at her house is about as sad as movies can be, and he’s left to wonder whether it was even worth it to get off the island.  There is no Hollywood ending here, no reassuring words from anyone that life will all go back to normal now, no triumphant return to Kelly; but the final frames perfectly articulate, without words, the present status of the life of someone who wants desperately to find a reason to keep living.

9) American Beauty

With a pitch-perfect tone of quiet desperation, American Beauty lulls you into respect and then shocks you into moments of startling recognition.  An unbelievably consistent film, it accelerates to climactic scenes you simply can’t take your eyes off, no matter how many times you’ve seen them.

Everyone in the film, inhabiting the worst aspects of the “American dream” gone very wrong, is fighting for a way out of the straitjacket flung onto them, by their family, friends, or society.  Some succeed, some don’t, and their efforts are all put together with a masterful economy of dialogue, timing, and scene construction.  Kevin Spacey’s performance lives inside of it, but everyone, from the other actors (notably Chris Cooper) to first-time director Sam Mendes and first-time writer Alan Ball to cinematographer Conrad Hall, makes a contribution that you won’t soon forget.

10) Million Dollar Baby

This 2004 Best Picture winner demonstrates precisely the power that a great movie can have—emotionally, psychologically, visually, and viscerally.  It introduces three richly developed characters—a boxing trainer, an aspiring fighter, and a former star—given rich and human performances by the actors, and it ties it all together with a stellar script.  This is the rare film that doesn’t want to be sarcastic or glib and is unashamedly emotional—and that’s before it reaches its apex.  Loses points only because it’s not quite so re-watchable and some of these others.

What’s so remarkable is how strong it is for its first two-thirds, before taking a right-turn and morphing, seamlessly, into something entirely different for the final act.  Million Dollar Baby lingers on the minds of viewers long after it’s over because of the way these three people’s lives interact that deeply affect all of them, for better or worse, and make it impossible for them to declare their previously dead-end lives meaningless.