Happily-married husband and father goes to fight in Afghanistan, gets killed, his no-good brother gets close to his family and they come to love him. Then the soldier, who wasn’t dead after all, comes back home to find his family has moved on without him. Drama ensues.
Unfortunately, none of that happened, or at least it didn’t happen very well. Tobey Maguire was decent as the soldier, but Jake Gyllenhaal just wasn’t pulling his weight and Natalie Portman wasn’t given much to do.
But the script is the worst part. First of all, there’s no way in hell the government would have considered him dead without finding a body. His helicopter goes down and he (along with another soldier) is captured by what we assume to be the Taliban. So why don’t they consider him “presumed dead” or “missing in action” or something?
But even granting them that (after all, if she doesn’t think he’s dead then there’s no movie), the pacing was incredibly slow, that older kid was cute for about five minutes before she started being annoying, and the whole fireworks at the end thing fizzled out before it started.
I haven’t seen the American version, but I saw the original Danish version a few weeks ago, and it was pretty good. Not uplifting, but good, or at least I thought so.
I thought the premise seemed incredibly derivative of something else I’d seen recently, but I haven’t been able to place it. Maybe it’s just one of those plots that’s “so obvious you assume it’s been done.”
Sounds similar to the story of Martin Guerre to some extent.
Given that both Sommersby and the musical, Martin Guerre, were horribly boring, I wouldn’t have high hopes for anything that is built off the original storyline. I have to wonder if the original book is all that decent to begin with. (Though, of course, perhaps it’s just ill-suited to live action.)