Movies like Brothers are a stark reminder of the dire state of screenwriting. The movie wants to harken back to a time when comedies could be character-driven and mine dark material, but it also wants to be a Farrelly Brothers movie. Still, the biggest issue is how it squanders the talent of its stacked cast and our precious time on this earth.
Max Barbakow’s Brothers is inspired by the films of Martin Brest and Walter Hill. Movies like Midnight Run and 48 Hours. Heck, a character late in the movie makes a reference to Warriors, another Walter Hill movie. The movies of Brest and Hill feature characters who talk in a way that is both organic and rhythmic, all the while revealing the darkness and tenderness that lies underneath their gruff surfaces.
They explore masculinity but not in a trite way, instead wondering about why men are the way they are. Looking at the toxic aspects and the positive aspects and wondering why it’s so difficult for men to express and allow themselves to be vulnerable. Their movies move with a natural sense of ease and fluidity that makes the films feel effortless.
Barbakow and his screenwriter Macon Blair take a simple story about the Munger brothers Moke (Josh Brolin) and Jady (Peter Dinklage) trying to recover stolen loot and turn it into a reminder that no bad movie is short enough. The recurring problem is how Blair’s script can’t decide on a tone.
One minute, we are dealing with the brother’s troubled relationship with each other and their mother, Cath (Glenn Close). The next minute, there’s a sex-crazed orangutan who doesn’t seem to care about consent. The darkly comedic observations and insults run headfirst into the gross-out, the subtle with the overt, except none of it works.
Blair’s script glides along in a tediously entertaining way. It’s never outright boring, but that’s due to Dinklage and Brolin. The two keep Brothers chugging along long after the tonal inconsistency and facile script have begun to grate. They portray these two damaged individuals with pathos and a deftness that, while the film may feel cheap, their emotions never do.
Brothers is helped by Brendan Fraser as a corrupt prison warden, Jimmy Farful, who manages to walk the line between cartoonish and a recognizable human being. He is at once something out of a Woody Woodpecker cartoon while also reminding me of people I have known in my life. The son of a corrupt Judge played by the eminent M. Emmet Walsh, who is rightfully ashamed of his spineless amoral offspring, but with his little screen time, he shows how the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
The parallels between the Mungers and the Farfuls are obvious. Both treat their children not as people deserving of love but as tools for their own ends. The problem is that while the actors are so good, the meat they have to chew on is stringy. Did I mention Marisa Tomei and Taylour Paige are in this thing?
Most directors would kill to assemble such a murderers’ row of actors, and to see Barbkow constantly foul the ball imbues Brothers with a mounting frustration. Fraser’s Jimmy tosses Dinklage’s Jady into a bathroom wall, where he bounces off and lands in a tub. There’s a lot of talk of Looney Tunes between the characters, but nothing Barbakow or Quyen Tran’s camera shows us hints that the characters are meant to be Looney Tunes-esque.
Tran frames Brothers in much the same vein as those old character-driven comedies from the 80s. There’s a fluidity to the camera as the characters move, and the set designs look like people live in these places. She does a great job grounding these characters into a reality, but then there’s the scene where Brolin’s Moke is digging around inside the corpse, and it’s not gross enough to be funny and not funny enough to be gross.
Brothers is infuriating because of its timidity. The actors are clearly game, but neither Barbakow nor Blair has the guts to do anything with them. But that’s not to say Brothers is without merit.
Truth be told, if the rest of the film had been as funny as the last twenty minutes, this review would look different. While I spent the majority of the movie stone-faced, the last fifteen minutes or so had me cackling.
Brothers works when Fraser, Dinklage, and Brolin, arguing with each other. Their toxicity and desperation for love mirroring each other in warped and twisted ways as they revert to being children as they try and argue and be heard. There’s a moment in an abandoned mall where there’s a Mexican stand-off between the three that is so funny that it angers me Brothers isn’t better.
Especially, since Close is almost unrecognizable as Cath, the twisted matriarch of the Munger clan. Close earlier this year appeared in Lee Daniel’s hilariously wrong-headed The Deliverance as the doo-rag-wearing Granny. It is a testament to her skill as an actor that she can play both Cath and Alberta, with a kind of grace that their absurdity is never played for laughs.
Cath is a thief who robbed a train on Thanksgiving thirty years earlier, causing her and her lover to abandon her family. She comes back into their lives like a wrecking ball. Cath is a good thief but a horrible mother, and Close understands this. But Blair’s script comes close to schmaltz, trying to reveal what Close’s face has so plainly exposed to us over the course of the film.
Brothers has a script with a solid premise but lacks the deftness and trust in the absolute top-shelf talent they managed to corral. The hulking Brolin as the emotionally fragile, whimpering loser contrasts with Dinklage’s rough and tumble machismo works even as most of Brothers doesn’t. Dinklage sports a glorious Tom Selleck-inspired mustache, and Brolin uses that expressive face beautifully as he is constantly on the verge of tears.
Both men are damaged by their mother callously abandoning them. But to Barbakow and Blair’s credit, they never allow that real hurt to mask that they are also not good people. Both men are users of people, though Moke tries hard not to be. In a way Moke’s desire to be better makes him more sympathetic, but he also left his brother behind the moment the cops showed up. Something that eats away at him and Jady both.
However, Brothers is too clumsy, too eager to get to the jokes at the sake of everything else. The emotional beats are often stepped on by Blair and Barbakow’s clodhoppers resulting in a movie that clocks in under ninety minutes but feels like Return of the King.
Images courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
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