Tommy Cahill (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a domestic fixer in "Brothers".“It’s funny that people are saying this is some kind of war movie,” says Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays emotionally bruised ex-con brother Tommy Cahill. “It is intertwined with a lot of other complications,” he concedes — those complications presumably being Sam Cahill’s life-altering torture in Afghanistan during the, uh, war — “but mostly it’s about what this man does to get back to the people that he loves and to his life.”
But Gyllenhaal isn’t wrong. Brothers focuses more on the psychological journey of an individual soldier than the structure of military conflict. You could say Brothers reverses the standard war movie formula by featuring the war in the soldier rather than the soldier in the war, and for that reason alone it does deserve some degree of differentiation. But it also begs the larger question: Has the term “war movie” become a bad word?
“A lot of our foreign distributor partners, domestic partners, and everybody involved I think saw past the normal war issues,” Kavanaugh said. “And they saw that something magical could be created by putting all these people together.”Director Jim Sheridan took a different, if more direct approach to the question: “I think there’s a denial that there’s a war going on at all,” he said. Source: www.movieline.com