www.list.co.uk/film DRAMA BROTHERS (15) 104min ●●●●●
Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen’s 2004 Danish drama Brothers (Brødre) is given a prestige Hollywood makeover courtesy of writer David Troy Benioff and director Jim In America Sheridan. The result in an engrossing, if flawed drama about the emotional devastation reeked by modern warfare. Tobey Maguire casts off his
Spiderman costume to play Sam Cahill, a quarterback turned Marine captain who leaves wife Grace (Natalie Portman) and their children to fight in Afghanistan. When Sam is erroneously reported missing, his irresponsible brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal channelling Colin Farrell) steps up to the plate to help Grace run her family home, leading to a full- on confrontation when the battle- scarred soldier finally returns.
If Brothers never achieves the visceral thrust of the original, it’s still a strongly performed chamber piece very much in keeping with Sheridan’s best work (My Left Foot, In The Name of the Father). Tracing the same narrative line as the Danish film, Benioff and Sheridan seem less sensitive to the feelings of Grace (played by Connie Nielsen in the original) and more interested in the eruptive sibling rivalry. As a result, Portman is mere catalytic window dressing to Gyllenhaal’s slovenly Tommy, while Maguire as Sam is excellent. The hell of war shadows his every movement. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 22 Jan.
Reviews Film
THRILLER/DRAMA A PROPHET (UN PROPHETE) (18) 155min ●●●●●
Taking its lead from Mohammed’s mantra that ‘This world is a prison for the faithful, but a paradise for unbelievers’ Jacques Audiard’s new thriller is a disquieting portrait of ambition and progression uncontained by the cell door. Callow, naïve youth Malik (Tahar Rahim) enters grown up prison with a view to keeping his head down for his six-year sentence. But murderous circumstance sees him aligned to the Corsican mafia who run the prison, led by scheming lynchpin Cesar (Niels Arestrup). The association brings Malik into contention with the burgeoning population of Muslim inmates. As prison population demographics begin to shift the cunning Malik uses all his resources to elevate his financial and hierarchical status.
Plotted and executed with the slow burn complexity that lovers of The Godfather and The Sopranos will appreciate, A Prophet is a wonderfully mature piece of filmmaking. Building on themes of misplaced loyalties, minority polemics and the disease of free market economies at play in his outstanding previous films (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Read My Lips) writer and director Audiard elevates us above the grime with a nod towards fantasy. Albeit one proposed by the Gospels. Biblical allusions flash across the screen in the form of subtitled chapter headings while the ghosts of victims guide Malik through the prison wilderness. The point being, one supposes, that sometimes faith is all we have.
Paced with an all too rare grace and intelligence and
boasting one of the finest assassination scenes ever committed to celluloid, A Prophet could just make you a believer. (Paul Dale) ■ Selected release from Fri 22 Jan. See feature, page 26.
DRAMA/THRILLER 44 INCH CHEST (18) 94min ●●●●●
How many hard men does it take to catch a toy boy? Five, it would seem, and they all seem to resemble Britain’s best character actors. Step forward Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson and Stephen Dillane. When car-dealing old lag Colin Diamond comes home from work one day, his beloved (Joanne Whalley) tells him she has met someone else. The ensuing fallout leads to lover boy (Melvil Poupaud) being locked in a cupboard while the East End’s finest cogitate revenge and murder. Touted as a follow up of sorts to Sexy Beast (it shares the same writers Louis
Mellis and David Scinto and stars Winstone and McShane), 44 Inch Chest is actually a very different animal. Dialogue heavy and set bound, 44 Inch Chest broadly appropriates Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Borgesian identity thriller Performance via Harold Pinter at his most foul-mouthed. It’s a fairly stagy actor’s piece and this bunch are more than up to the job. The pleasures are incidental or theatrical and the plot is thin and largely meditative. As such the film ultimately disappoints but Dillane does a fine job keeping up with the old boys and Angelo Badalamenti’s score is one of his finest. It’s McShane though who steals the show, more or less reprising his role in Sexy Beast as the queerest and most brutal of fences. (Paul Dale) ■ Out now on general release. See profile, listings.
21 Jan–4 Feb 2010 THE LIST 47