This melodramatic film does have some fine acting from the principal players, skillful cross-cutting and certain other spare externals which place it in the fashionable Dogme school of cinema, but at the same time it suffers from an excessive lifting of plot and characters from other and finer films. The central plot strand, for instance, one of two brothers, the good one the apple of his father's eye and the bad one the source of the cartoonish father's consistent irritation, is by and large an inferior retelling of that old James Dean flick, "East of Eden." In fact, it's so imitative of this last, it even has the bad brother becoming a candidate for the affections of the woman initially devoted to his good sibling. Secondly, the Afghan war plot strand, with its focus on the surprising and horrific actions war may unleash in the otherwise most pacific of men, though actually shocking, is nevertheless too heavily indebted to and not as good as the memorable Vietnam War sequences of "The Deer Hunter." These Afghan scenes, by the way, do have the courage to show Taliban members as brutal fascists, a daring that "sensitive" Hollywood has yet to engage in.
But the real poverty of this film is revealed not just in its too heavily imitative melodrama, but in its status as a melodrama with philosophical pretensions. It aspires to comment on the human condition, but its vision is merely therapeutic and sadly trite. Thus we have not only repetitive visual sequences of reeds blowing in the wind, but even a stale, repeated jingle about there being no good nor bad, nor right nor wrong, "save Love which never dies." This last I put in quotation marks, since it's not only the philosophy of the film but embarrassingly also the quoted credo of the absurd feminist Katisha from Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado." In seeking to rise above melodrama to the transcendent, this film becomes one more fallen soufflé.
But the real poverty of this film is revealed not just in its too heavily imitative melodrama, but in its status as a melodrama with philosophical pretensions. It aspires to comment on the human condition, but its vision is merely therapeutic and sadly trite. Thus we have not only repetitive visual sequences of reeds blowing in the wind, but even a stale, repeated jingle about there being no good nor bad, nor right nor wrong, "save Love which never dies." This last I put in quotation marks, since it's not only the philosophy of the film but embarrassingly also the quoted credo of the absurd feminist Katisha from Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado." In seeking to rise above melodrama to the transcendent, this film becomes one more fallen soufflé.