What ‘Brothers’ Says About Afghans and Americans
Only three days after President Barack Obama announced a 30,000 U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan, Jim Sheridan’s Brothers went into wide release. The story of filial ties tested through loss and shaky reunification boasts an impressive lead cast of some of Hollywood’s brightest young stars Natalie Portman (Grace Cahill), Tobey Maguire (Captain Sam Cahill), and Jake Gyllenhaal (Tommy Cahill). Unfortunately, the formidable talents of the film’s three young stars are largely wasted in a script that creates little emotional resonance and ultimately does no favors for neither Obama nor the Afghans.
Given the close proximity of the film’s wide release to Obama’s announcement, Sheridan’s portrayals of the Afghans takes on an even more dubious tone. The film continues the tradition of soulless, one-dimensional, war-mongering villainous portrayals of ‘the Muslim world.’ There is no image of a single Afghan who is not brandishing a gun, yelling and cussing at the Americans to leave, or seen as otherwise treacherous and disloyal. The only ‘woman’ we see is hidden behind a Burqa and cussing at Captain Cahill and Private Joe Willis (Patrick Flueger). Though the film spends a great deal of time building the uncle-niece relationship between Gyllenhaal and the Cahill children, a reference to the uncle-nephew relationship of an Afghan accused of treason against the Taliban is seen as nothing more than a cowardly ploy. The film never questions the role of such a young boy in a bloody insurgency. In fact, the eventual death of the little boy is given no resonance as he appears largely out of frame after being shot down by American soldiers.
Obviously this is a film about an actual war and actual insurgents who behave much like Sheridan’s characterizations told from an American perspective, but they are not the only Afghans and to pay no attention to the tolls of the war on Afghans who have nothing to do with the insurgency is lazy and unimaginative. Without complicating the portrayal of the Afghans at all, Sheridan is bringing nothing new to the table at a time when the war that serves as the backdrop of so much of the film’s central conflicts is being debated by people all over the world. Soon after arriving back in Afghanistan, Captain Cahill says that it feels oddly home-like and yet the audience is never given the sense that to some people Afghanistan is home.
As with Gyllenhaal’s turn in the Sam Mendes helmed Jarhead, Brothers aims to take on a complex issue that politicians and intellectuals from both sides of each war are still grappling with, but ultimately falls flat. What Sheridan’s portrayal adds up to is a fictional echoing of General William Westmoreland’s infamous statement that ”the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”
Like any good Orientalist tale, there is an opposing force to the savagery of the Oriental blood lust. The Occident in this case is Midwestern America where Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire not only go to the same school, they are family. As opposed to the Orient, where family is seen as something that thrusts people into violence and paternity with evil, the Occident is a tight-knit though flawed family.
Unfortunately, the audience has little opportunity to see those Cahill family bonds form as any moment that may endear us to the characters and help us feel their closeness is rushed through in order to get the film to its next plot point with as little complexity as possible. The staid good son / bad son dynamic of Gyllenhaal and Maguire’s characters and their relationship to their drunken father (Sam Shepard) is never fully tested. In fact, though Gyllenhaal and Shepard bare their feelings for one another within the film’s first half hour, neither ever has the drive to fully attack the other and a few scenes later they are literally offering up sitcom style instantaneous apologies and laughing with one another.
The complete lack of real conflict in a story whose backdrop, pathos, and complexity should all be steeped in conflict is ultimately one of the most frustrating parts of the film. The other contentious part of a film entitled Brothers is the downright vapidness of the film’s emotion. Because so much of the conflict has already been revealed in the film’s trailer, there is never any real connection between the motivation of the characters’ emotional ties and the conflict we all know is coming.
Since we know that Maguire will be thought dead only to re-appear amid a twisted would-be love triangle, it would be interesting to know if Captain Cahill knows that not only did his family believe him to be dead but that they had a funeral for him. Likewise, Hank Cahill seems so incensed by his son in the beginning of the film and yet never does he begin to question the nature of the relationship between Tommy and Grace. For her part, Natalie Portman cops to being the high school cliche yet aside from professing her unexpected love for U2 and taking a joint from Tommy’s hand she does little to move beyond any cliches in such a flat role. The Cahill brothers’ loving step mother, Elsie (Mare Winningham) brings little emotional verve when confronted with a highly contentious moment between Tommy and Hank. Her stance reveals that Elsie wants to take control of the situation and put two men she deeply loves in their place, but instead she stands to the side with an occasional “Hey, hey” to show her disapproval at a family falling apart at the seams.
It is unfortunate that for a film whose tag-line professes “There are two sides to every family,” Sheridan barely shows the audience one complete side to an imperfect family caught in extraordinarily wrenching circumstances.