Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, Sam Shepard, Bailee Madison
FILM:
The brothers Cahill are mirror images of one another – there is something captivatingly similar about them, yet they are polar opposites in every way. Sam (Maguire) is the pride of his military family, and if it isn’t him on all those Army Recruitment adverts then it is someone exactly like him from a family down the road. Their father Hank (Shepard) is a Vietnam veteran, and everything about their yawning, grey town stinks of the peculiarly American backwardness that leads great legions of youngsters into the army… or the penitentiary.
Younger brother Tommy (Gyllenhaal) has followed the second of these inevitable paths, serving a stint for armed robbery. When Sam picks Tommy up from prison their reunion is not tarred with bitterness or scowls. They share an understanding that their lives are following chaotic and dangerous paths over which they have little control, and as dissimilar as they seem, their two paths are very much intertwined.
Sam is reported missing, assumed dead, soon after returning for his second tour of Afghanistan; and his weeping but mature wife Grace (Portman) is left to care for their two young daughters. Tommy – desperately trying to cling to a straight and sane life despite the emotional battering of his cruel father – tries to help Grace around the house, doing all the odd jobs that Sam would have done. At first she is reluctant, she has never approved of her stepfamily’s tearaway, but eventually she relents. It isn’t hard to surmise that two lonely mourners thrown together by loss might grow to rely on each other and, to the extent that love is a form of reliance, to love each other.
But unbeknownst to the fragile young couple, Sam is alive in Afghanistan and struggling to survive at the hands of a ruthless militia. He is forced to kill a fellow soldier shortly before US troops rescue him. And when he returns home the central focus of the story becomes less about death and revenge and more about jealousy, identity, and guilt within a tight-lipped family.
This is certainly a film that relies on tangible and electrifying emotions being held just below the skin, where the audience can sense their power but not feel bombarded by them. And who better than the wise man of cinematic family dramas, Jim Sheridan, to direct? With a filmography that includes ‘In America’, ‘In the Name of the Father’, and ‘The Boxer’, Sheridan is a force of nature with an extraordinary ability to uncover the subtlest of nuances in a scene and then guide actors to find it themselves.
Sheridan brings a clarity and subtlety to the complex story, which allows the drama to feel sparing but always emotionally engaging. The film might be criticised at times for feeling slightly cold or ‘distant’, and it is certainly difficult to work out who we should be ‘rooting for’, but this is not a failing in the film, it is a success. The cast, the score, and the setting combine to evoke expectations of a melodramatic ‘Douglas Sirk’ drama masquerading as a post-New-Hollywood Indie film in the mould of Gus Van Sant or Ang Lee. What this film really is, is a staunch and uncomfortably honest Skandinavian film masquerading as a Hollywood Indie.
The performances, while being inseparable from Sheridan’s direction, do a lot to recommend this cast of young but experienced actors. Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, and Natalie Portman are three of the most experienced actors working in Hollywood today, which, considering their ages range from 29 to 35, is quite remarkable. With credits like Donnie Darko, Leon, Closer, and The Cider House Rules between them, it is unusual that these actors do not demand more respect. Perhaps it is the fact that they are all young and beautiful and life is far too easy for them already without adoring masses of people massaging their egos.
They all hold their own in this subtle, and very European, Hollywood Indie. Maguire is boyish and harmless before his ordeal, but there is still a cold ruthlessness about him that erupts on his return. Gyllenhaal manages to turn his doe-eyed innocence into a hardened glare as the harmless ex-con. And Portman’s quivering and aching performance as the wife who must lose her husband twice (first to death, and then to madness) is absorbing.
The most surprisingly moving performance (perhaps because this is really a film about vulnerability and the difficulty of harnessing and understanding difficult emotions) is that of 10-year-old, Bailee Madison. Her powerful performance perfectly harnesses the unspoken and crippling feelings of the adults, and without her tear-stricken screams the film would lack a certain irascibility.
EXTRAS:
Before examining the DVD ‘extras’, it is important to take note of one essential factor of this project that was not mentioned in the above film review… this is a remake of a 2004 Danish film, Brødre, by Susanne Bier. It is important to know this because it is the only topic discussed throughout the entirety of the ‘extras’. One of the three extras is actually an overt attempt to justify the remake, and the others (Sheridan’s commentary and an investigation into Sheridan’s mastery of the family drama) rarely escape from constantly referencing the original and desperately explaining why this version is so different and ‘important for America’.
Sheridan’s commentary is interesting if you care about filmmaking and the ways in which a filmmaker can elicit performances from his cast. His constant references to Bier’s original exemplify how seemingly small changes (such as deciding to show Gyllenhaal’s character physically leaving jail) have a profound thematic and dramatic impact on the story, and force any number of changes further down the line (such as having Maguire’s character act more sympathetic, rather than judgemental, of his wayward brother).
The fact that these two brothers are infinitely similar and yet worlds apart is certainly one of the most important elements of the story, and the fact that Sheridan and Gyllenhaal found a way to introduce this new complexity that was absent from the original in such a subtle and seemingly inconsequential way is fascinating to anybody interested in the art of filmmaking and storytelling in general.
However, for the 95% of viewers who are not specifically interested in the technical art of filmmaking, this may prove a drawn-out and uninteresting affair. Sheridan is undoubtedly an enigmatic and fascinating character, but his constant need to explain why he changed things from the original means that he gets bogged down in deeply technical elements of storytelling and only rarely provides interesting ‘on-set’ anecdotes.
Similarly, the two ‘featurettes’ (concerning the adaptation of Bier’s film and Sheridan’s ‘auteur’ sensibilities) become bogged down in “they did this but we changed it to that” comments and rarely provide an entertaining, anecdotal insight into the making of the film.
Of course any film concerning the domestic consequences of a botched foreign policy will be particularly pertinent for the USA, a nation that has been at war with everybody, including itself, for over half a century. But there is no way of justifying a remake on social grounds without first admitting to one moot point… American people just wont read subtitles.
In short, this is an excellent, if slightly distant, psychological drama with a stellar cast and a master director. But the extras do little to add to the experience and could be ignored without really missing anything.
FILM:
The brothers Cahill are mirror images of one another – there is something captivatingly similar about them, yet they are polar opposites in every way. Sam (Maguire) is the pride of his military family, and if it isn’t him on all those Army Recruitment adverts then it is someone exactly like him from a family down the road. Their father Hank (Shepard) is a Vietnam veteran, and everything about their yawning, grey town stinks of the peculiarly American backwardness that leads great legions of youngsters into the army… or the penitentiary.
Younger brother Tommy (Gyllenhaal) has followed the second of these inevitable paths, serving a stint for armed robbery. When Sam picks Tommy up from prison their reunion is not tarred with bitterness or scowls. They share an understanding that their lives are following chaotic and dangerous paths over which they have little control, and as dissimilar as they seem, their two paths are very much intertwined.
Sam is reported missing, assumed dead, soon after returning for his second tour of Afghanistan; and his weeping but mature wife Grace (Portman) is left to care for their two young daughters. Tommy – desperately trying to cling to a straight and sane life despite the emotional battering of his cruel father – tries to help Grace around the house, doing all the odd jobs that Sam would have done. At first she is reluctant, she has never approved of her stepfamily’s tearaway, but eventually she relents. It isn’t hard to surmise that two lonely mourners thrown together by loss might grow to rely on each other and, to the extent that love is a form of reliance, to love each other.
But unbeknownst to the fragile young couple, Sam is alive in Afghanistan and struggling to survive at the hands of a ruthless militia. He is forced to kill a fellow soldier shortly before US troops rescue him. And when he returns home the central focus of the story becomes less about death and revenge and more about jealousy, identity, and guilt within a tight-lipped family.
This is certainly a film that relies on tangible and electrifying emotions being held just below the skin, where the audience can sense their power but not feel bombarded by them. And who better than the wise man of cinematic family dramas, Jim Sheridan, to direct? With a filmography that includes ‘In America’, ‘In the Name of the Father’, and ‘The Boxer’, Sheridan is a force of nature with an extraordinary ability to uncover the subtlest of nuances in a scene and then guide actors to find it themselves.
Sheridan brings a clarity and subtlety to the complex story, which allows the drama to feel sparing but always emotionally engaging. The film might be criticised at times for feeling slightly cold or ‘distant’, and it is certainly difficult to work out who we should be ‘rooting for’, but this is not a failing in the film, it is a success. The cast, the score, and the setting combine to evoke expectations of a melodramatic ‘Douglas Sirk’ drama masquerading as a post-New-Hollywood Indie film in the mould of Gus Van Sant or Ang Lee. What this film really is, is a staunch and uncomfortably honest Skandinavian film masquerading as a Hollywood Indie.
The performances, while being inseparable from Sheridan’s direction, do a lot to recommend this cast of young but experienced actors. Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, and Natalie Portman are three of the most experienced actors working in Hollywood today, which, considering their ages range from 29 to 35, is quite remarkable. With credits like Donnie Darko, Leon, Closer, and The Cider House Rules between them, it is unusual that these actors do not demand more respect. Perhaps it is the fact that they are all young and beautiful and life is far too easy for them already without adoring masses of people massaging their egos.
They all hold their own in this subtle, and very European, Hollywood Indie. Maguire is boyish and harmless before his ordeal, but there is still a cold ruthlessness about him that erupts on his return. Gyllenhaal manages to turn his doe-eyed innocence into a hardened glare as the harmless ex-con. And Portman’s quivering and aching performance as the wife who must lose her husband twice (first to death, and then to madness) is absorbing.
The most surprisingly moving performance (perhaps because this is really a film about vulnerability and the difficulty of harnessing and understanding difficult emotions) is that of 10-year-old, Bailee Madison. Her powerful performance perfectly harnesses the unspoken and crippling feelings of the adults, and without her tear-stricken screams the film would lack a certain irascibility.
EXTRAS:
Before examining the DVD ‘extras’, it is important to take note of one essential factor of this project that was not mentioned in the above film review… this is a remake of a 2004 Danish film, Brødre, by Susanne Bier. It is important to know this because it is the only topic discussed throughout the entirety of the ‘extras’. One of the three extras is actually an overt attempt to justify the remake, and the others (Sheridan’s commentary and an investigation into Sheridan’s mastery of the family drama) rarely escape from constantly referencing the original and desperately explaining why this version is so different and ‘important for America’.
Sheridan’s commentary is interesting if you care about filmmaking and the ways in which a filmmaker can elicit performances from his cast. His constant references to Bier’s original exemplify how seemingly small changes (such as deciding to show Gyllenhaal’s character physically leaving jail) have a profound thematic and dramatic impact on the story, and force any number of changes further down the line (such as having Maguire’s character act more sympathetic, rather than judgemental, of his wayward brother).
The fact that these two brothers are infinitely similar and yet worlds apart is certainly one of the most important elements of the story, and the fact that Sheridan and Gyllenhaal found a way to introduce this new complexity that was absent from the original in such a subtle and seemingly inconsequential way is fascinating to anybody interested in the art of filmmaking and storytelling in general.
However, for the 95% of viewers who are not specifically interested in the technical art of filmmaking, this may prove a drawn-out and uninteresting affair. Sheridan is undoubtedly an enigmatic and fascinating character, but his constant need to explain why he changed things from the original means that he gets bogged down in deeply technical elements of storytelling and only rarely provides interesting ‘on-set’ anecdotes.
Similarly, the two ‘featurettes’ (concerning the adaptation of Bier’s film and Sheridan’s ‘auteur’ sensibilities) become bogged down in “they did this but we changed it to that” comments and rarely provide an entertaining, anecdotal insight into the making of the film.
Of course any film concerning the domestic consequences of a botched foreign policy will be particularly pertinent for the USA, a nation that has been at war with everybody, including itself, for over half a century. But there is no way of justifying a remake on social grounds without first admitting to one moot point… American people just wont read subtitles.
In short, this is an excellent, if slightly distant, psychological drama with a stellar cast and a master director. But the extras do little to add to the experience and could be ignored without really missing anything.
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