This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Intended as a traumatic melodrama about the harrowing toll of war on the home front, Brothers is a prodigal son story that collapses under the weight of its own narrative schizophrenia and lacks the courage of its convictions to follow through with the story on which it initially embarks. While it boasts some powerfully acted moments, they are never enough to elevate the film into anything greater than the sum of its parts.

Brothers is the story of two 30-something siblings. One, Sam (Tobey Maguire), is a Marine officer on yet another rotation in Afghanistan. A dedicated husband and father, Sam leaves behind his high school sweetheart, Grace (Natalie Portman), and two young daughters (Bailee Madison and Taylor Grace Geare). The other brother, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), is the black sheep of the family, a felon just out of a stint in prison for armed bank robbery. The brothers’ father, Hank (Sam Shepard), isn’t shy about voicing his opinions: he makes sure everyone knows how proud he is of Sam and how worthless he deems Tommy.

When his Black Hawk helicopter is shot down, Sam is presumed killed in action. Wrestling with the sudden gulf in all their lives, Tommy steps up and tries to bear some of Grace’s burden. But Sam is not dead, merely a Taliban prisoner of war. As Sam’s captivity spirals ever deeper into hell, Tommy finds domesticity suits him better than he ever imagined. Thrust together by the most tragic of circumstances, Tommy and Grace find themselves battling an attraction that is both exhilarating and mortifying. But when Sam shocks them all by showing up at home one day, a gaunt, broken shell of his former self with black sludge where his humanity used to be, he becomes violently obsessed with discovering what his brother and wife have been up to.

Six-time Oscar nominee Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father, In America) based Brothers on Susanne Bier’s Danish film Brodre, at times nearly perfectly duplicating entire scenes and shots. A superbly naturalistic director with a fastidious attention to detail and an almost spooky rapport with child actors, Sheridan lets scenes appear as if they were created on the spot rather than premeditated in a script. This naturalism, which has done wonders for his films in the past, continues to work here so long as the camera is at home with Tommy and Grace. When it leaves the couple to travel to the battlefields of Afghanistan with Sam, it loses much of the realism that made it so effective.

Brothers is like two films in one, a family drama and an edge-of-your-seat psychological thriller. The film turns on a single moment of such implausibility that nearly everything that comes after it rings false as a result. While the event itself is not far-fetched (tragically, one need only turn on the news to see that the incident and the aftermath are all too common), it is completely out of character for the person involved. Nothing in his history points to such behavior; if anything, the film goes to great lengths to make us feel precisely the opposite. This emotional about-face collapses the structural integrity of the narrative, a calamity from which the film never recovers. As it limps across the finish line toward healing, muddled and unresolved, we are left to wonder if the final act was negligently never loaded onto the projector.

About the only thing Brothers has going for it are uniformly great performances from each of its leads. Maguire is excellent as the quintessential family man coming apart at the seams. He even convinces us he’s a hard-as-nails Marine, something improbable at first. His transformation into a paranoid mad dog is genuinely terrifying. Portman, while given too little to say or do, proves once again that her waterworks are second to none. Gyllenhaal, all charm and bravado, still manages to be convincingly and appropriately vulnerable. Perhaps most surprisingly, the young girls more than hold their emotional own with the adults.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.