Susanne Bier has made a film that is both superb and complex: it explores profound love and disaffection, the transference of senses across a continent, sibling rivalry, severe guilt, familial dysfunction, and, most of all for me, the insanity of war and how it filters down to a single microcosm -- the family -- and destroys it.
That Bier manages to do all of this in less than two hours is a major achievement. You would be hard-pressed to find greater acting anywhere in a single film. Ulrich Thomsen as Michael, the ill-fated Danish soldier and father, is devastating in an acting tour-de-force as a man who comes unwound after a soul-destroying experience as a prisoner of war in Afghanistan. Nikolai Lie Kaas plays his presumably irresponsible brother Jannik -- his opposite -- with a rough tenderness and nuance that's very difficult to see these days. His facial expressions when he hears about his beloved brother's fate are remarkable examples of flat-out great acting.
I was stunned to find that this was Connie Nielsen's first film in her native Denmark. She's apparently been working in Hollywood. As the middle-class loving wife of Michael, she is the very picture of a tormented but warm and loving mother caught in a crossfire of emotions over the assumed loss of her husband and her attraction to the flawed Jannik. Her performance requires a high-wire act of emotions, but she manages to understate her work, a very difficult thing to do in such a demanding role. She's a beautiful woman, but director Susanne Bier manages to shift the focus from her beauty and concentrate on her plight as a conflicted wife and mother. That's not easy to do.
There are many themes at work in Brothers, but the one that really caught me was the deceptively simple way that Bier shows us the shattering reality of war and militarism in general. Behind all the medals and the bravado (I'm a former soldier who's familiar with this stuff), human beings and human relationships are very often profoundly, and irreversibly, affected. Yet we rarely hear about the intimate details of these very real tragedies.
There's a lot of hand-held camera work in Brothers, and it seems to flirt with a number of Dogme 95 principles. It's very difficult to make a Dogme 95 film with all l0 principles intact, it seems to me. Even Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, the prime shakers behind the movement, have drifted away from the 'purity' of Dogme. Despite its severe restrictions, I'm still a basic fan of the movement. After being saturated with so much CGI, it was inevitable that the dialectic was set in motion and Dogme 95 was unleashed in a furious proclamation by von Trier and company. There just HAD to be a severe reaction against the CGI fanatics who INSIST on destroying artistic cinematic expression.
Susanne Bier has done a masterful job with Brothers. I was just swept away by the sheer power of this film.
That Bier manages to do all of this in less than two hours is a major achievement. You would be hard-pressed to find greater acting anywhere in a single film. Ulrich Thomsen as Michael, the ill-fated Danish soldier and father, is devastating in an acting tour-de-force as a man who comes unwound after a soul-destroying experience as a prisoner of war in Afghanistan. Nikolai Lie Kaas plays his presumably irresponsible brother Jannik -- his opposite -- with a rough tenderness and nuance that's very difficult to see these days. His facial expressions when he hears about his beloved brother's fate are remarkable examples of flat-out great acting.
I was stunned to find that this was Connie Nielsen's first film in her native Denmark. She's apparently been working in Hollywood. As the middle-class loving wife of Michael, she is the very picture of a tormented but warm and loving mother caught in a crossfire of emotions over the assumed loss of her husband and her attraction to the flawed Jannik. Her performance requires a high-wire act of emotions, but she manages to understate her work, a very difficult thing to do in such a demanding role. She's a beautiful woman, but director Susanne Bier manages to shift the focus from her beauty and concentrate on her plight as a conflicted wife and mother. That's not easy to do.
There are many themes at work in Brothers, but the one that really caught me was the deceptively simple way that Bier shows us the shattering reality of war and militarism in general. Behind all the medals and the bravado (I'm a former soldier who's familiar with this stuff), human beings and human relationships are very often profoundly, and irreversibly, affected. Yet we rarely hear about the intimate details of these very real tragedies.
There's a lot of hand-held camera work in Brothers, and it seems to flirt with a number of Dogme 95 principles. It's very difficult to make a Dogme 95 film with all l0 principles intact, it seems to me. Even Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, the prime shakers behind the movement, have drifted away from the 'purity' of Dogme. Despite its severe restrictions, I'm still a basic fan of the movement. After being saturated with so much CGI, it was inevitable that the dialectic was set in motion and Dogme 95 was unleashed in a furious proclamation by von Trier and company. There just HAD to be a severe reaction against the CGI fanatics who INSIST on destroying artistic cinematic expression.
Susanne Bier has done a masterful job with Brothers. I was just swept away by the sheer power of this film.