Òn the Couch

The horrors of war is a territory frequently trampled on by Hollywood, sometimes to impressive effect (Bridge Over the River Kwai, Platoon, The Deerhunter) and sometimes with all the the subtlety of a brick wrapped in barbed wire being shoved up your… nose (Pearl Harbour).

While Vietnam was the go-to war for a long time to score political points, recent years has seen the first and second Gulf wars (Jarhead, The Hurt Locker) and, more recently, the military operation in Afghanistan become the wars of choice.
Jim Sheridan’s Brothers deals with the problem of coping with readjusting to real life with a side-order of screwed-up childhood and a sprinkling of trite redemption.
The two brothers at the film’s centre Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) are painted as being polar opposites. Tommy is a recently released bank robber with a history of violence, dodgy dealing and fecklessness, while Sam is a captain in the Marine Corps, the apple of his daddy’s eye and a loving father and husband.
Tommy gets released just as his brother heads back to Afghanistan and seems to be falling back into his bad habits until he gets word that Sam has been killed in action.
In trying to help out his brother’s widow, Grace (Natalie Portman), in the aftermath of the death, Tommy reconnects with his parents and finds stability in spending time with Grace and his two nieces.
This happy little idyll is upset, however, when daddy arrives home, having been rescued from the Taliban camp he has been held prisoner in for months – but where many flicks would fade to a happily ever after, Brothers continues, focussing on the now unstable and war-damaged Sam as he tries to get back to family life.
It’s all stirring stuff – to a point. Well acted and competantly directed, the dynamic between Gyllenhaal, Portman and McGuire is interesting but is underexplored in favour of fitting too many other dynamics into the story – the father’s tough time in ’Nam, how Tommy never apologised to a woman he traumatised during his bank robbery.
Also, the point that war is hell and nobody every really comes home – while a worthy one – has been made, and made better, in other films. There’s very little new here and what is, gets marginalised by broader ideas that are, ultimately less interesting than the family drama that could have been.
From one form of family drama to another – it might be the young Russian bride, or the drunken anti-semetic ranting, or even that giant beard he grew when he was shooting Apocalypto, but I just can’t get my head around Mel Gibson as an actor any more.
Unquestionably a good director, the once entertaining goofball action hero who became something of a “serious actorrrrrr” makes his post-scandal return to acting as Boston police detective Thomas Craven in Edge of Darkness, a dark revenge flick reaching for greater significance than its story will allow.
Opening with a tragedy, it’s not too spolierific to reveal that Craven’s daughter is killed in a drive-by shooting, the target of which is presumed to be the old, grizzled policeman, not the young woman.
As daddy investigates the incident, however, a mire of dodgy industrial shennanigans is revealed with daughter dearest’s former employers, Northmoor, at the centre and the company’s CEO, played by Danny Heuston, pulling the strings.
All in all Edge of Darkness is a fairly bland “one man versus a corporate conspiracy” affair.
As a shady “fixer” for Northmoor, Ray Winstone makes an appearance with his standard grouchy but interesting schtick that might as well have been introduced with a customer service announcement that, “the role of Ray Winstone will be played by RAY WINSTONE”. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that it’s nothing new for the talented Brit.
Gibson himself is very hard to take seriously in the lead partially due to a terrible BAW-stun accent and partially because his recent public profile makes it hard to accept him as any character other than himself.
It’s barely tolerable fare but if you really, really need a Mel fix, you’d be better off digging up Payback from 1998. Now that’s a fun flick.