Combat shock: Tobey Maguire in Brothers

Directed by Jim Sheridan. Starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Sam Shepard, Mare Winningham, Bailee Madison, Taylor Geare, Patrick Flueger 15A cert, gen release, 104 min

AFTER THE perfectly barmy Get Rich or Die Tryin', Jim Sheridan gets back to what he does best with this solid, if not particularly subtle, melodrama based on an acclaimed Danish film by Susanne Bier.

We are introduced to a blue- collar family whose members, with their clearly defined flaws and virtues, would be equally at home in a daytime soap opera or a Eugene O’Neill tragedy. Hank Cahill (Sam Shepard), the boozy, hard-faced dad, is as proud of his son Sam (Tobey Maguire), a soldier heading for Afghanistan, as he is ashamed of his other boy Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), recently released from prison for an unspecified offence.

When Sam is reported dead, Tommy starts cleaning up his act and, after helping rebuild her kitchen, gets just a little too close to his widowed sister-in law (Natalie Portman). Dad continues to fume in the shadows.

Revealing what happens next may risk spoiling the story (though the trailer spills the beans). Suffice to say that Brothers does not drift merrily towards an untroubled conclusion. The characters scratch away at one another and reveal hitherto unsuspected tensions.

The big secret at the heart of Brothersseems to come from a different film: such things may happen, but it fits awkwardly with an otherwise disciplined piece of work.

Still, what we want from a Jim Sheridan movie is rooted performances, and the nicely contrasting turns from Maguire (gimlet eyed), Gyllenhaal (conflicted) and Shepard (stony) enliven every scene in which they appear. Portman seems a little too glamorous for these ordinary streets (lit beautifully by Frederick Elmes, a regular David Lynch collaborator), but she does a good job of conveying the withering effects of grief.

For all that good work, the film is mostly notable for yet again demonstrating Sheridan’s quite extraordinary way with children. The performances by Taylor Geare and Bailee Madison, playing Shepard’s daughters, are jaw-droppingly effective, and the dinner-table arguments through which they suffer painfully are significantly tenser than the somewhat perfunctory battle sequences.

All in all, a solid piece, despite the unfortunate superfluity of U2.