It was the same ol’, same ol’ at the box office this weekend, with The Blind Side trading places with The Twilight Saga: New Moon for slots No. 1 and 2, respectively. Brothers, the week’s biggest new release, slid into the No. 3 position with $9.7 million. I don’t imagine a lot of Plugged In readers will flock to see this dark, R-rated film. But since I reviewed it, I wanted to offer just one little thought.
As I mentioned, Brothers is pretty bleak. It’s partly a war flick, after all. We see some pretty terrible stuff happen in Afghanistan, where Sam, one of the film’s titular brothers, is held for months by, apparently, the Taliban. But as trying as some of those scenes of terror and torture were, the one that got to me the most took place after our war-scarred brother returned home and tried to re-bond with his two young daughters.
The moments between he and, especially, his daughter Isabella, were painful to watch. Isabella knows she’s supposed to love her daddy. But he’s so different now, so unfamiliar, so scary. So she faces Sam with dutiful formality, her chin quivering, her eyes shiny and wet. As the father of a daughter myself, it tore at my heart to watch it.
Maybe it’s telling that, in a film featuring some pretty intense scenes (we watch a man get beaten to death with a pipe, for heaven’s sake), the one that moved me most had no violence, no action, no real dialogue. Just a child bravely blinking away tears.
It made me wonder what that says about what we’ve become desensitized to … and what still moves us.
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