Jim Sheridan’s ‘Brothers’ looks deeply at family ties

No one does a better impression of Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan than his old friend Bono. On a recent crystal-blue afternoon in L.A., the rock star, who was in town for a concert at the Rose Bowl, lifted his shoulders, dropped his chin and scowled like Popeye. He slapped a palm to his forehead and began rubbing hard, like a man trying to sandpaper off an eyebrow. Then in a growled brogue, he muttered: “Do you want to have a look at the pitch-chur? It’s a ting about brud-ders.”

Yes, the new Sheridan picture is “Brothers,” and it’s a thing about family, the nature of duty, war, guilt and calamity of the human heart. Bono and his mates in U2 saw a rough cut of the film, which hits theaters Friday, and jumped at the chance to contribute original music to the project. They recognized many familiar themes from Sheridan’s illustrious body of past work (which includes films such as “My Left Foot,” “In the Name of the Father,” “The Boxer”) but saw something new too in this tale about the wounds suffered by not only those on the battlefield, but by the loved ones left at home as well.

“Jim’s stories have a kind of simplicity, usually, at the plot level and the complexities are in the drawing of the relationships,” Bono said. “This one though is actually quite a complex plot line. He really went for this one. There are very strong feelings in this. It’s a powerful, powerful film.”

Sheridan, who does indeed rub his face and hairline with alarming and frequent gusto, has the aura these days of a man who knows he has something special on his hands. During two interviews, one in New York and the other in Los Angeles, the 60-year-old filmmaker spoke of “Brothers” as a new direction of sorts, and he was clearly enthused about the performances of his three stars, Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman.

“I think it’s successful as a film, although it’s not for me to judge,” Sheridan said. “It’s very accurate. It’s elegant. It’s a Cain and Abel story of sort. It’s not a movie about the war in Afghanistan, it’s a movie about a family that has a component in Afghanistan. It’s not a liberal, antiwar film, either. It could be any war. As for it being antiwar, does anyone make pro-war movies?”

A primitive setting

In the most simple terms, the Sheridan film is about the Cahill brothers; one who returns from prison (Gyllenhaal’s Tommy) and one who goes off to war (Maguire’s Sam), and the woman (Portman’s Grace) who comes to love both of them.

The war scenes were filmed in the hard shadows and craggy pits of the New Mexico desert. “It’s like you’re in a prehistoric place, a place that once existed and teemed with life,” Sheridan said. “If you stood there in the past the life would be swimming past your face but now it’s fossilized. It brings up these emotions that are primitive and, I suppose, have to be kept below the surface.”

While fighting in Afghanistan, Sam is forced to make a moral decision that carries with it lasting and irrevocable consequences. “There is an act in the story that is beyond tragedy, beyond normal, beyond the expected,” Sheridan said. “[Sam] is shattered by that act and he comes back home looking for his soul, which is represented by his wife. But she has now discovered love with his brother.”

“Brothers” is Sheridan’s seventh film and arrives less than a month after the 20th anniversary of his first feature, “My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown,” which earned him an Oscar nomination for best director and another for the screenplay. (The film won acting Oscars for Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker.) Sheridan, a six-time Oscar nominee, arguably now stands as Ireland’s most important filmmaker.

After mapping Ireland in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, Sheridan crossed the Atlantic for the setting of “In America” in 2002, but the acclaimed movie was still steeped in Irish experience. Not so with his most recently released film, 2005’s “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” which starred 50 Cent in a crime film that borrowed its beats from the rapper’s own life.

For “Brothers,” Sheridan found his story in an unexpected place in “Brødre,” the highly regarded 2004 Danish film about two brothers -- one who goes to war, one fresh from prison -- and the woman who becomes the hypotenuse in the triangle. David Benioff (“The Kite Runner,” “Troy”) wrote the script. The original film and Sheridan’s take on the material are removed by vast distances in their details and rhythms, but the director confesses to some discomfort in revisiting ground that has been mined in the past.

“I had intended to make a different movie, a story about two brothers growing up in Dublin,” he said, “and I got into a weird place with it on a financial and personal level.”

The financial situation was in part the difficulty of moviemaking in Ireland, and the personal, perhaps, was the idea of going home once again as a filmmaker. For Sheridan, memories of a complicated childhood are never far from him.

“When I was 12 my dad suddenly went from a little cottage to a big huge house with lodgers,” Sheridan said. “I would study these characters sitting there. The cast was always changing, these men coming into our house. It was in Dublin near a place that’s now called Sheriff Street . . . up the street was a neighborhood that was like the projects of Ireland. You had to deal with these kids that would come down and have a fight. It toughened me up as a kid.”

His father started a theater group and that set Sheridan on his career path. It also led, in 1977, to his meeting with a youngster named Paul Hewson who came to the group for mime lessons; Hewson was already going by the nickname Bono. For Sheridan, the theater eventually led to film. For the young Bono, well, the mime thing didn’t quite work out. But not to worry -- he found other outlets for his creative talents.

Nothing flashy

Like all of his movies, Sheridan’s “Brothers” is austere and patient; the director is not a likely candidate to inundate audiences with flashy special effects or narrative slight of hand.

“Cinematically, it’s not trying to be ‘Memento’ or a Christopher Nolan movie, it’s just not in that way and neither am I,” Sheridan said. “I love Christopher Nolan, don’t get me wrong. It’s a jealous statement. I wish I could be like that. Sometimes I wish I could let go of the words in my head. The Irish condition is primarily schizophrenic. When you get a great Irish writer -- the best are Joyce or Beckett -- and they tend toward madness. The verbal mind . . . our culture is visually deprived.”

Sheridan was impressed with the discipline of Maguire, the polish of Portman and, perhaps most of all, the easy authenticity of Gyllenhaal, whose somewhat scattered on-set demeanor is a search for clues, not a symptom of cluelessness.

“Jake is very good at that, searching for something in a scene,” Sheridan said. With a chuckle he added: “It’s not that he doesn’t know his lines. He’s always looking for something in the scene. It makes it feel real.”

In some early reviews, critics have been fixated on comparing “Brothers” to its Danish relative (“A more polished but less effective twin,” is how Variety put it, for instance) but the cast (which also includes Sam Shepard and Mare Winningham) and subject matter have made the movie a recurring topic of awards-season chatter.

Sheridan has his ear on that, of course, but is already gearing up for his next project. In his hotel room in L.A., Sheridan ripped open a parcel that had just been delivered. Inside were head shots and bios of actors; the director is now casting “Dream House,” a thriller which will star Daniel Craig as a New York publishing executive who moves his family to New England but learns that their new home has a bloody past.

“It’s a genre movie . . . and I’m trying to get it to be something else,” Sheridan said. “I think I’m getting there. It’s about a man who knows who he is, spiritually, and in the start of the film he’s insane but by the end of the film he kind of regains his sanity.”

Filming is set to start early next year, and while Sheridan may be no Christopher Nolan, he is pushing more into a Hollywood mode -- in his unglamorous and Irish way.

“I was watching the [electronic press kit] for the movie and the actors and how professional they are with the stillness in their face and their eyes and then it comes to me and I look like a person from a lunatic asylum,” Sheridan said with a mock moan. “My face is squinting up, my eyes, I’m scratching my head. I look at it and go, ‘Who is that?’ We never see ourselves the way others do, I suppose. Good thing.”

geoff.boucher@latimes.com