Word: filming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When it comes to handing out gushy blurbs for movies, David Letterman is no Larry King. Yet when Natalie Portman was a guest on his show recently, the crabby old host couldn't stop raving about her new film Brothers. "This is the finest film made in the last 12, 20 years," he effused, and Portman nearly ducked, as if to avoid being drenched by the torrent of praise...
Brothers isn't up there in the empyrean of classic movies, but it is a solid drama - about a family at war with itself - that handles its combustible elements with care and gets strong, accurate performances from Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman. The release of the film has either perfect or ominous timing, for it opens just after President Obama's announcement that he was sending additional troops to Afghanistan. Brothers, written by David Benioff and directed by Jim Sheridan, is about a soldier sent to that perilous region, with dire results for him, his fellow Marines...
...romance (Heloise and Abelard) and in 19th century poetry (Tennyson's "Enoch Arden"), not to mention dozens of movies about men whose wives think they're dead and marry someone else. All these motifs appear in the script that Anders Thomas Jensen wrote for Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish film Brodre, of which Brothers is a nearly scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, Americanization. Except for a few stunt exercises, like Gus Van Sant's Psycho and Michael Haneke's remake of his own Funny Games, I can't think of a movie that so closely adheres...
Sheridan's movie is like a reverent revival of a famous play, but one that is an improvement on the first version. Brodre is a nicely judged, finely acted film, and of course it was there first, but the new picture has a more impressive cast and a director who is sensitive to just about every nuance of character and situation. Tommy at first seems a malingering loser, blaming his situation on everyone but himself - his stern father (Sam Shepard) and even Sam, who loves him and sticks up for him - and when Sam is reported dead, Tommy typically thinks...
...beginning, the film seems to suggest that good men go to war, and weak men stay home. But what it's really saying is that the men we send to war are at risk of returning broken, diseased and damaged and that those changes can be a danger for those around them - including, and especially, the ones they love most...