BAGGAGE! BAGGAGE! BAGGAGE!

Title: Brothers
Director: Jim Sheridan
Writer: David Beinhoff
Cast: Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman

“It was like waiting for your bags at the airport for an hour and a half”
-Andrew Ehmke

Brothers is a film about a love triangle (Baggage) involving an American war hero, his wife and his semi-erect brother. When Sam (Tobey Maguire) gets the call to return to Iraq for his fourth term of duty he is forced to leave his wife, Grace (Natalie Portman) and two young daughters behind. Then he dies, well not actually, he’s presumed dead after his helicopter is shot down (even more baggage) which breaks the family apart, but also releases his fuckin sneaky brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) from living in his sibling’s shadow. Tommy pulls himself together and takes on his brother’s role in the family; playing affectionately with his nieces, helping out around the house and inevitably falling in love with his sister-in-law –Fuckin Scumbag. This makes for a messy situation and even more baggage when his brother ‘returns from the dead’ - with Mike Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ jolling - playing in the background scarred, tortured and shell-shocked from his wartime experiences.

The film boasts some quality performances from Maguire’s as the American war hero model husband and father which starts off slowly and rather unconvincingly, but boils towards a fantastic and furious conclusion. The last thirty minutes of the film are dominated by Maguire’s skillfully portrayed mix of confusion, tension and anger that is well worth its accolade. But it is Gyllenhaal who, I believe, is the film’s unsung hero ala Brokeback when he was the bottom His effortless and solid depiction of the ‘troubled man pulling it together’ is easy to look past and forget. It is his performance that holds the film together, especially with Portman delivering a woefully unconvincing exposé of the widowed mother of two.

On the whole, however, the film is far too neat and polished –and filled with baggage- to convey the turmoil and confusion that families experience during wartime. The audience is forced to wade through over an hour of slow moving drama before the conflict occurs and the momentum quickens. One feels the film is meant to be about how war tears families apart, but there is so much going on that this idea gets hidden amongst the myriad of undercurrents, subthemes and baggage. When it comes down to it, it is a film of moments more than anything and baggage.
So when the silky U2 soundtrack fades and the emotional high of Brothers subsides the audience will be left asking themselves what on earth they are meant to take from the last 104 minutes of their lives and wishing to never visit another airport baggage terminal again.

I give it 6 hoers!
Andrew ‘the lost son of Terry’ Gilliam