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.