Brothers (2009)

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About

Brothers is a 2009 American war drama film directed by Jim Sheridan and written by David Benioff. It is a remake of the 2004 Danish film Brødre (Brothers (2004)) by Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen, and like the original it borrows the outline of Homer's Odyssey: a soldier believed dead comes home to find his place in the family has changed. The film stars Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman, and was released in the United States by Lionsgate on 4 December 2009.

Plot

Marine Captain Sam Cahill is everything his younger brother Tommy is not: a decorated officer, a devoted husband to his high school sweetheart Grace, and a loving father to daughters Isabelle and Maggie. Tommy has just been paroled after serving time for armed robbery, and their father Hank, a Vietnam veteran, makes no secret of which son he is proud of.

In 2007 Sam deploys to Afghanistan, where his helicopter is shot down. He and Private Joe Willis are the only survivors and are taken prisoner by the Taliban, but back home both men are declared killed in action.

With Sam gone, Tommy steps up to support Grace and the children. He renovates the kitchen, bonds with the girls, makes peace with his father and apologises to the bank teller he once held at gunpoint. He and Grace grow close and share a single kiss, which neither of them takes any further.

In captivity, Sam and Joe are starved and tortured. Sam is finally given a choice between his own life and Joe's, and beats Joe to death with a metal pipe. Months later he is rescued and brought home, silent, gaunt and consumed by guilt. He lies to Joe's widow Cassie about how her husband died, his daughters become frightened of him, and he grows convinced that Grace and Tommy slept together while he was away.

Ending explained

The film comes to a head at Maggie's birthday dinner. Isabelle, hurt and angry at the father who came back a stranger, squeaks a balloon until Sam bursts it in a rage. She retaliates with the cruellest thing she can think of: she claims that her mother and Uncle Tommy are sleeping together, and tells Sam she wishes he had stayed dead. It is a lie, but it confirms exactly what Sam already believes.

That night Sam wrecks the newly finished kitchen with a crowbar and holds Tommy at gunpoint. When the police arrive he fires into the air and demands that they shoot him, then puts the gun to his own head. Tommy talks him down, Sam tells his brother he is drowning, and he surrenders.

Sam is admitted to a Veterans' Affairs hospital. Grace reads the letter he wrote to be delivered in the event of his death, then visits and gives him an ultimatum: tell her the truth or lose her and the girls for good. Sam finally confesses that he killed Joe, and they hold each other. The film closes on his voiceover, which turns on the old line that "only the dead have seen the end of war" and asks whether a man who has seen it can live again. The ending is deliberately unresolved. Sam's marriage survives the confession, but the film does not promise that he recovers.

How it differs from Brødre (2004)

Sheridan's film follows Susanne Bier's original closely, scene for scene in places, but several changes alter its tone.

  • The soldier and his mission. In Brødre, Michael is a Danish army officer on a three-month posting with the international force in Afghanistan, and is shot down while searching for a missing radar technician. In the remake, Sam is a US Marine captain and the man imprisoned with him, Joe Willis, is a private from his own unit, which makes the killing a betrayal of someone under his command.
  • Why the captors force the killing. In the original the captors decide the technician is no longer useful once Michael has shown them how to arm an anti-aircraft missile. The remake presents it more starkly as a test of whether Sam will kill to see his family again.
  • The lie afterwards. Michael offers false hope that the technician may still be alive. Sam visits Joe's widow, played by Carey Mulligan, and cannot tell her what happened.
  • The standoff. Michael seizes a policeman's pistol and points it at the officers. Sam uses his own gun and turns it on himself, shifting the scene from threat to suicide attempt.
  • Where he ends up. Michael is sent to prison, where his wife Sarah visits him. Sam is sent to a veterans' hospital, which frames his breakdown as an injury of war and not a crime.
  • The children. The daughters have far more to do in the remake, and the birthday dinner built around Bailee Madison's Isabelle is its best-known scene.

Critics generally preferred the original. Brødre holds 89% on Rotten Tomatoes and 76 on Metacritic against 63% and 58 for the remake, with reviewers describing the American version as a more traditional melodrama carried by its three leads.

Where to Watch

  • Amazon
  • Brothers was released on DVD and Blu-ray on 23 March 2010.

Details

Director: Jim Sheridan

Writer/Screenplay: David Benioff (screenplay), Susanne Bier (motion picture "Brødre") and Anders Thomas Jensen (motion picture "Brødre")

Producer: Ryan Kavanaugh, Michael De Luca, Sigurjon Sighvatsson

Tagline: There are two sides to every family.

Running time: 1h 45min

Certificate: R

Budget: $26,000,000 (estimated)

Box office: $43,500,000 (worldwide gross). The film earned $28.5 million in the United States and Canada and $14.9 million in other territories. It opened in third place with $9.5 million from 2,088 theatres and ended its US run on 21 January 2010.

Genre: * Drama

Released: 4 December 2009 (USA)

Music Composer: Thomas Newman

Cast

Soundtrack

The score was composed by Thomas Newman. Brothers (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) was released by Relativity Music Group on 30 November 2009.

The film's closing song is "Winter" by U2, which was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.

Related

Trivia

  • The film is a remake of the 2004 Danish film Brødre, directed by Susanne Bier, who co-wrote that version with Anders Thomas Jensen. Both films draw on Homer's Odyssey.
  • Jake Gyllenhaal was filming Brothers when his close friend Heath Ledger died in January 2008.
  • Carey Mulligan has a small role as Joe Willis's widow. The film reached cinemas in the same year as An Education (2009), which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
  • Hank Cahill, the brothers' father, is a Vietnam veteran, and Tommy accuses him of pushing Sam into the Marines because of his own service.
  • Brothers opened on the same weekend as Everybody's Fine and Armored.
  • The Danish original was later adapted into an opera, Brothers, by Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason, which premiered in Aarhus on 16 August 2017.

Critical Reception

Brothers received mixed reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 63% approval rating from 156 reviews, with an average score of 6.2 out of 10, and on Metacritic it scores 58 out of 100 from 31 critics. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B.

Tobey Maguire's performance drew the strongest notices. Roger Ebert awarded the film three and a half stars and wrote that he had not seen such darkness in the actor before. USA Today praised the chemistry between Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal while finding Natalie Portman's role subdued, and New York magazine's David Edelstein admired all three leads. Others were less convinced: Entertainment Weekly gave it a C+ and called Jim Sheridan's direction heavy-handed, and a common complaint was that the remake lacked the restraint of Bier's original.

Awards and nominations

  • Golden Globe Awards: nominated for Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama (Tobey Maguire) and Best Original Song ("Winter", U2).
  • Saturn Awards: nominations including Best Performance by a Younger Actor for Bailee Madison.
  • Critics' Choice Movie Awards: Bailee Madison was nominated for Best Young Performer.

Links

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