Brothers Review

Remaking Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish film meant keeping its cruelest device, the cave where a captured marine is made to kill a fellow prisoner with a length of pipe. Jim Sheridan stages that sequence well and then spends the American half smoothing everything Bier left jagged. Tobey Maguire returns hollowed out, and his performance splits the picture in two: the quiet stretches, where he cannot hold a fork steady or finish a sentence to his children, are genuinely frightening, while the kitchen demolition and the bulging-eyed shouting play like an audition.

Jake Gyllenhaal takes the harder, less showy job as the family disappointment who turns out to be the steady one, and he underplays it correctly. Natalie Portman is asked mostly to look worried in doorways. The child actors carry more than they should, and Bailee Madison's birthday dinner outburst is the scene people remember, earned rather than engineered.

Frederick Elmes photographs the suburb in a flat winter grey that suits the material. The ending is where the nerve goes. Bier let the damage stand. Sheridan reaches for a confession and a reconciliation, handing back the ambiguity the first ninety minutes worked for.