Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
I saw Brothers a couple of days ago. I'd read that it's not quite as good as the Danish Brødre from which it was remade, in which case the Danish one must be extraordinary indeed.
Tobey Maguire was an odd, and IMO not entirely suitable, choice to play a captain of Marines but other than that the acting was quite good, although I never forgot that Natalie Portman's character was being played by Miss Portman (which may have been simply because of her greater fame than any failing in her acting. One still notices that Meryl Streep portrays her own characters). The screenplay was mostly good: the best parts were those back in the U.S., which comprised most of the movie. The parts in Afghanistan, while necessary to the story, seemed odd to me (the Taliban just held on to two Marines for months while inflicting only the occasional bout of torture? It seems like they'd want to do more of something, anything, than just keep them locked up).
But to my mind, the best thing about the movie was its sociological and psychological commentary. In this respect it wasn't about a service family's troubles, and it wasn't even about family troubles per se, really. It did show how, without intention, intergenerational favoritism can emerge in a family simply from the praxis of life, and how it can be no less destructive of family relationships for the lack of intention behind it; but although a service family was the vehicle for that in this movie, it was not a comment on military families specifically or generally.
The most powerful message though was to draw a clear distinction between criminal behavior and personality. The entire movie was one long example of criminality inhering in actions rather than persons, such that changing behavior can lead a person into or out of criminality. Nor was the importance of context left out (and it's in this connection that family dysfunction and uncritical homage of the armed services were employed). A seemingly fundamentally honorable person can do the worst things, and a seemingly useless one can be redeemed, by putting them in the right context to encourage certain avenues of behavior.
It has just occurred to me, though, that the movie seems to suggest that criminal behavior requires a certain psychological quirk, and that while circumstances may provide a medium for the quirk's development, there's a personal consideration required for the quirk to take root. Likewise, circumstances may also smother it, so that the fundamental personal characteristic required for criminal actions or behavior may appear and vanish in an individual in the course of their life. And that quirk is, to deny the humanity of another person (by which I mean to say that the denial need not encompass all other people), or to devalue their own life, or lives, in comparison to one's own.
These are remarkable things to find these days in an American movie about a service family: that servicemen may be flawed individuals, while convicted criminals may still be decent individuals, all depending upon circumstance rather than some immutably fundamental character.
Tobey Maguire was an odd, and IMO not entirely suitable, choice to play a captain of Marines but other than that the acting was quite good, although I never forgot that Natalie Portman's character was being played by Miss Portman (which may have been simply because of her greater fame than any failing in her acting. One still notices that Meryl Streep portrays her own characters). The screenplay was mostly good: the best parts were those back in the U.S., which comprised most of the movie. The parts in Afghanistan, while necessary to the story, seemed odd to me (the Taliban just held on to two Marines for months while inflicting only the occasional bout of torture? It seems like they'd want to do more of something, anything, than just keep them locked up).
But to my mind, the best thing about the movie was its sociological and psychological commentary. In this respect it wasn't about a service family's troubles, and it wasn't even about family troubles per se, really. It did show how, without intention, intergenerational favoritism can emerge in a family simply from the praxis of life, and how it can be no less destructive of family relationships for the lack of intention behind it; but although a service family was the vehicle for that in this movie, it was not a comment on military families specifically or generally.
The most powerful message though was to draw a clear distinction between criminal behavior and personality. The entire movie was one long example of criminality inhering in actions rather than persons, such that changing behavior can lead a person into or out of criminality. Nor was the importance of context left out (and it's in this connection that family dysfunction and uncritical homage of the armed services were employed). A seemingly fundamentally honorable person can do the worst things, and a seemingly useless one can be redeemed, by putting them in the right context to encourage certain avenues of behavior.
It has just occurred to me, though, that the movie seems to suggest that criminal behavior requires a certain psychological quirk, and that while circumstances may provide a medium for the quirk's development, there's a personal consideration required for the quirk to take root. Likewise, circumstances may also smother it, so that the fundamental personal characteristic required for criminal actions or behavior may appear and vanish in an individual in the course of their life. And that quirk is, to deny the humanity of another person (by which I mean to say that the denial need not encompass all other people), or to devalue their own life, or lives, in comparison to one's own.
These are remarkable things to find these days in an American movie about a service family: that servicemen may be flawed individuals, while convicted criminals may still be decent individuals, all depending upon circumstance rather than some immutably fundamental character.
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 10:49
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