“I don’t know who said ‘only the dead have seen the end of war.’ I have seen the end of war. The question is, can I live again?”

Jim Sheridan’s Brothers, a relationship drama based on a Danish film of the same name (Susanne Bier’s Brødre), matches the plot of the original film closely, albeit presenting it in a polished form suited for Hollywood. Its dynamic and well-acted characters give the film vitality, and its emotive dark finale leaves a lasting impression.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire portray brothers Tommy and Sam Cahill, respectively. After a brief opening, in which Sam pleasantly interacts with his family, he is shipped off to Afghanistan as Tommy is just returning home from prison. When Sam’s helicopter is shot down, he is presumed dead. His wife, Grace (Natalie Portman), handles the situation as her name would imply, holding herself together for the sake of their two young daughters. Hank (Sam Shepard)—the father of the two brothers—is a Vietnam veteran who shows open contempt for the son who survived, and regularly compares the shortcomings of Tommy with the achievements of his brother. Out from under his brother’s shadow, Tommy hesitantly seeks some sort of personal redemption, awkwardly trying to fill in however he can in his brother’s absence. The mature but distraught Grace initially refuses his help, but over time she gradually warms to his constant presence. Expectedly, as the two spend more time together, hints of romance begin to emerge.

Soon after he is announced as dead, we learn that Sam survived his crash landing, and is being held captive in a cave with another soldier. The film jumps between the home life of Sam’s family, as they try to rebuild a semblance of normalcy, and the nasty conditions which Sam faces as a captive of the Taliban. The scenes in Afghanistan do not shy away from grueling images and evocative situations. Sam is forced into paradoxical actions, prodded by the impossible moral conundrums he faces. These contradictions of his moral code are of the sort armchair ethicists would enjoy mulling on, only intensified by his life-or-death situation. His predicament necessitates immediate decisions, forcing him into deliberate actions that will haunt him for the rest of his life and prove nearly impossible to forgive himself for.

According to Greek philosopher Heraclitus, you cannot step into the same river twice, for you and the river will never be the same as you are in this moment. And so it is that when Sam returns to his family, he finds himself in a different place than the one he left. He is rescued and returns home as a hero, but his mentality is permanently warped. Instead of a reliable family man, Sam is now akin to Travis Bickle, the paranoid insomniac from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Though he is greeted with open arms by his family and community, he experiences no joy upon his return, and finds himself to be unwelcome and unneeded. After the extended episode of ultra-heightened awareness and the egregious actions he has committed and now keeps secret, his emotions are dulled to the point of nonexistence. He mostly lives inside his own head, and acts strange toward his wife and children. In the scenes prior to Sam’s return, the audience never sees the romantic development run its course between Tommy and Grace, and it leaves the subject ambiguous; but that doesn’t matter. The key character study of the film centers around Sam’s insistence that his brother and his wife slept together.

Tobey Maguire turns in an exaggerated but convincing performance as the paranoid, distrustful, and delusional Sam Cahill, and the confused bond between the brothers is balanced by a characteristically charismatic performance by Gyllenhaal (the script does not require as much from him as it does from Maguire, allowing Gyllenhaal to exhibit a bit too much natural charm to make the penitent Tommy believable). As Sam wrestles with his conscious, tensions escalate, and the film transcends its initial scope of marital fidelity and the evils of war, asking questions about the nature of forgiveness, confession, and catharsis. But it does not try to go about answering anything in a cohesive manner—instead we see a scatterbrained veteran trying to process his PTSD amidst a family of damaged individuals who have repeatedly wounded one another and themselves.

Natalie Portman is mature in her emotional role, and Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare give wonderful performances as the children. The film is intentional in showing the effects that the behavior of adults can have on the instincts of the young minds they are responsible for. The adult misconduct that the girls witness severely warps their natural senses of trust and companionship, which we watch play out in real time even as we see the lingering negative effects Hank’s parenting has had on Tommy and Sam. One of the most heart-wrenching moments of the film is when young Isabelle (Madison), unable to reconcile this new version of her father with her memory of the one she loved, screams into his face, “Couldn’t you just stay dead?!” She also anchors two contrasting scenes—one early in the film, in which she holds back tears in the presence of her father, as she tries to ignore him, unwilling to accept his imminent deployment; later, a similarly evocative moment shows her holding back tears again, this time as she forces herself to endure a hug with the emotionally absent shell of a man who has returned from the war.

In the harrowing climax, the paranoid husband paces around his kitchen in the middle of the night with a crowbar. When Grace approaches him, he bursts, taking the weapon to their newly remodeled kitchen in an explosion of glass and wood. He screams in high-pitched tones, questioning if Grace understands what he has done for her, what his hands are capable of (which of course she does not because he will not reveal the cause of his obvious inner turmoil to anyone). When Tommy arrives, Sam pulls his gun on his brother before turning it on himself as police cruisers arrive at their home.

There is an interesting contrast between the two brothers, as their vaguely analogous stories play out in reverse—Sam’s plunge into the darkness of questioning his role as a husband and father, uncertain of his manhood after a lifetime of overachieving in the classroom, sports, family, and the military vs. Tommy’s redemptive arc of righteous action after a lackluster adolescence and run-ins with the law—the same event (the helicopter crash) having been the turning point in both men’s lives.

Brothers effectively utilizes the war in Afghanistan as a scaffold to tell a dramatic story of relationships, mental breakdown, and forgiveness. At times it can feel too polished—especially when compared to the Dogme 95 inspired original. It excels in conveying more than what it shows on-screen, allowing its dialogue, body language, and facial expressions to carry meaning that is necessary for understanding untold events that have occurred, giving the Cahill family a legitimate sense of history. In other words, it lets its actors do their job, which doesn’t quite turn out flawlessly but is certainly engaging.