For what’s supposed to be a personal family drama, Brothers is as maddeningly unoriginal in its plot as it is in its title. It can be as cold as the winter weather of the film’s setting and as distant as the Rocky Mountains in the background of all the scenery. Further complicating things is the fact that as much as Tobey Maguire can ably fill the boots of your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, seeing him play a hardened Marine captain taxed even my nimble ability to suspend disbelief. Kind of corny but still occasionally compelling, Brothers follows a simple plot, but mixes sporadic bouts of serious drama with its well-worn characters. And in case you didn’t already realize this, the trailer pretty much gives the ending away.

Maguire plays Sam Cahill, a respected soldier about to return to Afghanistan for another tour of duty. In one of those cosmic coincidences that only happen in movies, Sam’s brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) is released from prison mere days before Sam disembarks. While in Afghanistan, Sam’s chopper is shot down and he is presumed dead with everyone else onboard. Sam’s wife Grace (Natalie Portman) is suddenly faced with the prospect of raising their two girls (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare) alone, but she finds returning to a normal life without Sam difficult to say the least. Listless, and without much going for him, Tommy steps in help Grace and the girls cope with Sam’s passing. Or make that supposed passing, as the captain is found alive, rescued from captivity after being held by insurgents.

It’s hard to tell which character is more cookie-cutter: Sam or Tommy. One’s a good old boy Marine with a dark side, and the other’s a misdirected bad boy with a heart of gold. Actually, the father played by grizzled 1890s prospector Sam Shepard is probably the most clichéd. A retired army vet that thinks the world of the son that enlisted and serves his country and has no time at all for the loser son with a criminal record. To be fair, the actors do hold some surprises in their performances. Despite the blatant archetypes that they play, both Maguire and Gyllenhaal hone finely nuanced performances where you can believe them as brothers. Portman is probably the shining star of the film, playing the grieving widow with neither over the top melodrama nor grating histrionics.

Overall, the family drama of Brothers works well. Certain scenes and moments tend to carry with them a genuine feeling of realism; times when your not thinking about how nicely divided the ground is between Sam and Tommy. Frankly, it would have been better if director Jim Sheridan had expanded on that and given us more on the homefront rather than continually take us away to Sam’s horrible POW experience at the hands of Afghan insurgents. There were so many scenes that practically covered the same ground again and again in regards to his treatment and they serve to do nothing other than make you say to yourself “Geez those Taliban are awful.” By the time Sam comes home haunted, we as the audience are practically haunted along with him. For me it would have been much more dramatically interesting if we had seen Sam leave and then see him come home broken. Leaving us wondering what broke him and how scared is he?

Despite the scripting issues and the Mad Libs characterization, there is something admirable in Brothers for the way it gently brings the war home. So many films made about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq focus on the politics or the battles in country, only Brothers and last year’s The Lucky Ones seem to really seriously address how soldiers may cope with their experiences once back to what was once their normal life. Sheridan may be channelling Tennessee Williams at times with how the film plays out with a Blanche DuBois-style meltdown, but his heart was in the right place. Plus he had the help of three very tremendous actors to bring the characters to vivid life rather than potentially let things veer too deeply soap opera territory.