'Brothers' tries to raise cain, but it isn't able

The movies “Brothers” could have been are better than the one it turns out to be.

It could have been the story of one good brother who has his life together and a bad brother who does not, and how their lives change places as the result of loving the same woman. It could have been the story of how the good brother is killed in war and how the bad brother works through his survival guilt by falling in love with the good brother’s widow. Or it could have been the story of how the good brother returns from war so crazed by his experiences that he goes on a killing spree.

The movie’s trailer, incidentally, favors this last scenario. The psycho good brother is outside his house, gun in hand, confronting the police. He is so dangerous that his wife and brother are yelling to the police, “Shoot him! Shoot him!”

What a great scene. And wouldn’t it be cool if it were actually in the film?

Instead, “Brothers” turns out to be about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the need for communication. It’s not a bad topic, but it could have been so much better. Considering the potential, the cast and the director, “Brothers” is a disappointment.

Tobey Maguire gets top billing as the good brother, a captain in the Marines who is a loving husband and father. Just as he is about to be redeployed to Afghanistan, he goes to bring his ne’er-do-well brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, back from prison. Things between them become tense when their father, Sam Shepard, lets them know that he prefers the good brother.

When the good brother is listed as killed in action, his wife -- played by Natalie Portman -- descends into depression. The bad brother decides to try to bring her out of it. The two grow close for the first time in their lives, and they have a positive effect on each other; the presumed widow finds happiness once more, and the bad brother turns good.

Up to this point, the story is at its best, but paradoxically the movie is at its worst. The actors don’t click together, the scenes don’t quite feel real. It is as if everything is slightly off-beat. Despite the exceptional cast (which also includes Mare Winningham as the brothers’ step-mother), the only natural acting actually comes from the young actresses who play Maguire and Portman’s daughters.

With this movie, which is based on a Danish film, director Jim Sheridan makes a misstep. Sheridan has previously made the wonderful “My Left Foot” and “In America” (and also the 50-Cent atrocity “Get Rich or Die Tryin’), but here the sense of family dynamics eludes him. Although some of the scenes in the second half of the film do work well -- the best is a tense birthday party scene, and Maguire does Crazy Eyes better than anyone in the business -- Sheridan cannot string enough of them together to create the power he is looking for.

The harsh and unshaded lighting indicates that Sheridan used digital cameras, so perhaps he had to make this film on the cheap. That could be the problem, but it is more likely to be just that the story (by David Benioff from the original Danish script) goes astray.

You can tell, because the ending feels so weak. Two of the characters are more interesting than the third, but the ending is about the least interesting one. And this story needs a catharsis, yet the ending lets us down.

It’s a viable ending. It just isn’t cathartic.