Brothers (2009)

Jim Sheridan's Brothers arrives with an impeccable pedigree and almost no interest in the cultural conversations that would come to dominate the following decade. It is a remake of Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish film, itself loosely tethered to the Odyssey, and it concerns a Marine captain presumed dead in Afghanistan, a brother who steps into his household, and the wreckage that follows the captain's return. This is a melodrama of the old school, which is to say it cares about grief, guilt, and the specific horror of a man who has done something unforgivable in order to survive.

Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Natalie Portman occupy the triangle, and the screenplay hands Portman little to do beyond waiting, worrying, and reacting. That is not a failure of the actress. It is the architecture of the story. The Afghan setting supplies antagonists and a torture sequence but no inquiry into race, empire, or the politics of the conflict. Sam's post-traumatic stress is rendered as damage, not identity, and the film shows no interest in recasting it as a form of neurological difference to be affirmed. The cast is white, the concerns are domestic, and the moral universe is biblical.

There is no sermon here. No character pauses to instruct the audience on how to feel about wealth, the climate, or the body. What remains is a heavy-handed domestic tragedy that creaks under the weight of its presumed significance, as a reviewer once put it, and it earns its modest place in the catalog. On the scale that concerns us, Brothers registers as a clean zero, an artifact from a time when a war film could simply be about a war and a family could simply fall apart. The sommelier finds nothing to swirl, and declines to pretend otherwise.

(Note: Thematic tags for this title: remake.)

{"thematic_tags": ["remake"]}