Band of Brothers

In Jim Sheridan’s Brothers, Capt. Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) returns from his tour of duty in Afghanistan a changed man: tender, responsive and attentive to the well-being of his young wife (Natalie Portman) and two daughters before the tour. His sickening, inhumane experiences in a Taliban prison camp have left him have rendered him a fearsome, bullying monster to his family, overcome with a possessive jealousy of his younger brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal). Sam, unable to express his remorse for a particularly dehumanising incident in the camp, unleashes his rage on his wife after a particularly awkward family dinner. “I’m no fucking hero,” he screams, as he smashes a golf club into Tommy’s restoration of his kitchen.

This interlocking, changing family dynamic becomes the foreground for the battle in the Middle East, as Sam’s homecoming serves as a painful reminder for their hardened military father’s difficult return from Vietnam.

Brothers is an American remake of the Danish drama Brødre. Directed by Susanne Bier (Open Hearts, After the Wedding), the 2005 film explored the Western occupation in Afghanistan in the form of a Biblical melodrama. Bier’s work is undoubtedly the better film: unlike the romantic, edgy quality of Bier’s very fine film, Sheridan’s obvious, stolid work has little of the earthy texture of the original (the Irish director is not helped by Thomas Newman’s incessant, misjudged score, a techno-infused remix of homespun Americana that smothers much of the drama).

But both productions attempt to relocate the war’s impact within the family unit and personalize the conflict as drama. In each film, the destruction of the kitchen epitomizes the soldier’s frightening inability to express his feelings to loved ones. Brødre and Brothers serve as an effective, personal counterpoint to the raft of overblown, preachy political films in the later part of last decade, including Peter Berg’s The Kingdom, Robert Redford’s UA relaunching Lions for Lambs, Gavin Hood’s Rendition and Brian De Palma’s Redacted (in fact, their heavy, aggressive political lines prompted a brief return on the part of the studios to more familiar World War Two archetypes in Daniel Craig’s robust savior in Defiance, David Thewlis’ patriarchal, repellent Nazi officer in The Boy in The Striped Balloon and Kate Winslet’s Oscar-winning turn as an SS guard in The Reader).

As opposed to the highly drawn political battle-lines of Stop-Loss and Lambs, Sheridan’s film juxtaposes the hellish, externalized conflict with an internalized anguish for the modern soldier, where their masked vulnerabilities and pain are brought to the fore in the family unit. In particular, the film’s later scenes are startling in the way the hero’s extraordinarily precise skills in Iraq modulate into bewildered vulnerability and awkward confusion in a materialistic Western society: a shot in which Jeremy Renner’s Staff Sergeant William James struggles to select a cereal box in a supermarket aisle is tinged with sad irony and pathos.

Unlike the earlier batch of post-9/11 productions (which, boringly, seemed intent on extending Hollywood’s fierce, vitriolic Culture Wars in the late ‘70s between Michael Cimino’s conservative, Gone With The Wind-style traditionalist epic The Deer Hunter, which won 1978’s Best Picture Oscar, and Hal Ashby’s strongly anti-War Coming Home, which starred “Hanoi Jane” Fonda), there is little political divide in the new films. If you would like to recognise the vastly contrasting ideological differences in the earlier films, compare the vastly diverse portrayals of the military in De Palma’s violent, digital-video experiment Redacted to the almost-saintly depiction of the idealistic, College-educated soldiers in Redford’s Lions for Lambs.

There was major talent involved in these enterprises, but the films failed to engage with the psychology and emotions of its characters with any kind of depth or dramatic purpose. Former Hollywood golden-boy Redford won few new admirers with Lambs (an early stumbling block for star Tom Cruise and his present venture as co-owner of United Artists studio), the critical and commercial failure of Rendition drove the Oscar-winning Hood into soulless blockbuster filmmaking with the thoroughly underwhelming X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Redacted’’s miserable response from critics and audiences further cemented the once-great filmmaker’s further decline into cultural irrelevance. American screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan found himself at the forefront of this trend with the polemic Lions for Lambs¸ shapeless action film The Kingdom and bland, ineffective BBC adaptation State of Play, forgoing intelligent, specific character detailing for broad, bland statements about America’s role in the Middle East.

But with the 2009 release of The Hurt Locker (in actuality a 2008 production, as it debuted to middling reviews at that year’s Venice Film Festival and was ignored by the Jury in favor of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler), the Iraq/Afghanistan War dramas what they were lacking: a fierce, wholly cinematic voice in Bigelow’s striking, compelling direction and intimate reflection in Mark Boal’s unconventional, fierily apolitical screenplay. Like ex-husband and collaborator James Cameron, Bigelow is an action filmmaker uncomfortable with long passages of dialogue (some of the writing in her biggest hit, Point Break, is almost excruciating in its cheesiness: delivering the line “little hand says it's time to rock and roll” was not one of Patrick Swayze’s finest moments as a performer), but she has a brilliant eye for creating clear, clean characterization through swift, unpretentious action. While the film contains more incident than half a dozen war dramas- as structured by Boal’s screenplay, the story is a series of unbelievably tense action sequences set around the disposal of bombs in Iraq- the character details of individual scenes contain more credibility and intelligence than the faux-documentary “realism” of previous films like Berg’s The Kingdom. 

In contrast to Brothers scribe David Benioff (a lightweight novelist-turned-screenwriter who made his debut with the hyped, but underwhelming Spike Lee film 25th Hour), debut screenwriter Boal is a former journalist who was embedded with a group of soldiers in Iraq. He is not only the better writer, but bolder and more ambitious, as well. Whilst Benioff generated a bluntly emotive dramatic charge in the film’s later scenes at the expense of the earlier film’s spiritual and romantic impulses, Boal’s concern with the personal implications of war for American soldiers is more deft and intelligent, slyly conveying the shifting dynamic between the three central characters through action and movement rather than pious clichés. The film is powered by its characterizations, including Renner’s heroic Staff Sergeant William James, Brian Geraghty’s troubled, confused young Specialist Owen Eldridge and the fine young actor Anthony Mackie (Half Nelson, Million Dollar Baby), who makes a fine counterpoint to the reckless, virtuoso James as his second-in-command Sergeant JT Sanborn, embodying a modest, unshowy heroism to Renner’s wild, reckless cowboy.

Even Grant Heslov’s The Men Who Stare at Goats- a fun, if uneven attempt to replicate the Vietnam-era energy of filmmakers Mike Nichols, Robert Altman and Norman Jewison- is as much concerned with the psyche and frailties of the modern soldier as it is making political messages about the futility and evil of torture against enemy combatants.

Heslov and star George Clooney’s liberal leanings are well known (as evidenced in Clooney’s sophomore effort behind the camera, the morally alert study of MacCarthyism Good Night, and Good Luck, co-written by Heslov), but this fictionalised account of the American military’s attempt to create extrasensory, telepathic “super-soldiers” reflects the intense psychological damage inflicted by war on the modern soldier.

True, the film has its problems (as a madcap, Coen-esque farce, playwright Peter Straughan’s screenplay is not on the same level as its actors and is far more comfortable in the now-relatively safer pastures of post-Nam America than the present conflict in the Middle East), but The Men Who Stare at Goats makes its points with purpose and a refreshing absence of pretension. Its scattershot structure and slow start eventually builds into a rousing battle between Clooney and Jeff Bridges’ peace-seeking “Warrior Monks” (or “Jedi Warriors”) and Kevin’s Spacey’s unctuous, self-serving careerist soldier. 

Paul Greengrass’ hyped, powerful Green Zone is a more successful, coherent attempt to merge genre filmmaking with critical political discourse, focusing on a loyalist’s growth into cynicism and dissolution to embody the wider military’s growing unease with Washington duplicity in the first months of the Iraq War. The liberal, politically conscious Greengrass is best known for his brilliant transformation of The Bourne Identity’s classicalism and formalist homage to the Cold War into an angry attack on blind American imperialism in the series’ sequels (the franchise’s originator, Swinger’s Doug Liman, has noted the series’ ideological shift since he jumped ship after 2002, telling Empire Magazine that the “sequels became very good action movies”, but “in The Bourne Identity, Chris Cooper is probably more sympathetic than Jason Bourne in terms of the problem he’s facing. Chris is a patriot. He’s doing the bidding of the United States, he’s doing what needs to be done. Bourne’s the one who’s off the reservation”).

Greengrass reconsiders the scorching political sub-text of his mega-budget Bourne pictures for an intelligent response to the West’s invasion into Iraq and their desire to unearth WMDs. Actor Jason Isaacs (who plays the vile, thuggish Major Briggs, a vicious point man to Greg Kinnear’s unctuous political mover) suggested that the adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone is an effective amalgam of the personal filmmaking of Bloody Sunday and United 93 with the star-powered excitement and propulsive entertainment of the Bourne series. Whilst the film does not quite find the visceral intensity of United 93, it is still an exciting, exhilarating thriller of the highest order, melding Lambs and Rendition’s earlier, unsuccessful attempts to re-conceptualize the conflict in the Middle East as an intellectual and moral argument with the robust action of the dramatically inert The Kingdom.

This time the fiery discourse between Pentagon officials, CIA chiefs and intelligence operatives do not feel like the lazy conceit of Hollywood screenwriters, but are the result of intense, intelligent research on the part of the filmmakers, enriching this very exciting thriller with a forceful moral intelligence. “There are no easy answers. We only have hard choices,” Brendan Gleeson’s CIA Baghdad bureau chief Martin Brown says, a striking, pointed response to the glib, easy liberalism of Lambs or Rendition.

Damon, the beloved American star who helped redefine the Mad Max/Man With No Name, silent hero archetype for the 21st Century in the Bourne series, gives a rounded, sympathetic portrait of the dedicated intelligence officer soldier Roy Miller. Like Bourne, Damon’s Miller is a man of action (“Do you want to sit around here digging holes all day?” he asks his men, before leading them on a mission to upturn an underground Iraqi general). But- even more significantly- he is a modern, sharp soldier, as willing to listen to his men as understanding Iraqi citizens, such as the like-minded, sympathetic Freddy (well played by The Kite Runner’s Khalid Abdalla), whom Miller hires as a translator and also serves as an unofficial advisor to the American soldiers. 

It is their dynamic - between American and Iraqi - that gives the film much of its effectiveness. Like the film’s other characters, Miller is a professional and his desire to find the WMDs stemming from his loyalty to his country, but, for Freddy, the matter is deeply personal. A former-soldier himself (he lost a leg during an earlier conflict in Iran), he deeply cares for his country and sees well-intentioned American soldiers like Miller as a way of bringing calm and peace to his troubled, upturned nation.

Written by Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential, Mystic River), their relationship prompts a great deal of uneasy questions for the soldier: what is his place within the newly restructured Middle East? How will his actions as a US soldier impact on Iraqi citizens? How can he help this nation when he is misinformed by his own Government?

Green Zone may not have all the answers, but it is the film’s desire to grapple with these issues that demonstrates courage on the part of its filmmakers, and the studio system.