When Susanne Bier's Danish film Brødre, or Brothers, came out in 2004 (starring Ulrich Thomsen from the Dogme incest movie Festen) it looked like painful arthouse drama with a weird dollop of mainstream Hollywood. Now it's been remade by Jim Sheridan, and looks like mainstream Hollywood with a weird dollop of painful arthouse drama. The plot is broadly the same. A career army officer gets captured in Afghanistan, and while he's missing presumed killed, the black-sheep brother back home feels psychologically liberated. Released from his sibling's shadow, he begins to blossom into the reliable one and gets rather too close to the presumed widow. Transposed now to a classic American setting, the film certainly does look intriguingly different from the usual template. The very idea of a US marine committing atrocities while imprisoned, even under torture and duress, isn't an obvious product of the Hollywood machine. Jake Gyllenhaal isn't too bad as the once despised brother, but popeyed Tobey Maguire over-acts madly as the straight-arrow soldier mentally scarred by his experiences, going into full Travis Bickle mode for the final breakdown. And there is a toecurling moment when his shy, sensitive little daughter has an outburst at her mum over a family dinner: "You wanna sleep with Uncle Tommy!" "Sleep with"? "Sleep with"? Where, oh where, did our innocent angel pick up that pottymouth euphemism? In an earlier scene, we'd seen her engrossed in Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. She did not learn it from that classic work, surely?
The Hollywood remake of the Danish love triangle psychodrama has its moments, but is too mainstream by half
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