Major makes wrong choice

And sharing his awful secret with his wife does nothing to absolve it

by Junius

Brothers is a deceptive film. The younger brother, though very attractively acted, does not really count in the end. The film seems as though it is going to be about his problems but the real story is with the elder brother. In that sense the film does not really begin until half way through when the army major (the elder brother) is captured by a remnant Taliban group in the hills of Afghanistan. It also stops before it should. Such a truncated film cannot be fully recommended.

Yet this core of the film is very compelling. It is Cain and Abel, a primordial killing. The Major promises his cowering fellow captive that they will both get out alive. Then one day the two of them are dragged from their prison hut and the agitated captors say they will kill them both unless the Major beats the other prisoner to death, allowing himself to live. Nothing in his life has prepared him for this extreme circumstance except a resourceful pragmatism which, in that harrowing moment, with all the threats and shouting from the turbaned enemy, suggests that he should live rather than they both should die. It is not, of course, reasoned; it is an efficient officer’s instinct. He beats the other captive to death as the lesser of two evils.

He is quite wrong. It is not the lesser of the two evils. He would be much better dead. It is much better to be killed than to kill. All experienced soldiers know that, and survivors of battle have to live afterwards with all the awful consequences of having killed instead of being killed. To kill by “friendly fire” makes it all the worse, and to actually beat your “brother” to death is obviously the worst of all.

It took me two days to figure out that the “brothers” of the title are not the siblings but the Major and his fellow prisoner. The trouble is that I’m not sure that the filmmaker knows it. The film ends before it should, in the sense that the guilt remains a family problem up to the last frame. The director chose a most beautiful parkland setting. The Major is shown from a distance beginning to tell his wife. Then the screen goes black.

Is that the solution? Is everything going to mend? All the domestic post-traumatic violence is going to gradually reduce with the confession to the spouse?

I think not. It is another shameful moment. She has demanded to know; indeed with all his threatening behavior, she has said that she will never see him again if he doesn’t tell what is so patently a deep worry. But he makes the wrong choice again. He should allow himself to become an outcast. He cannot ask her to share the secret, no matter her demand. He has to become a Lord Jim and accept a life of penance alone.

Don’t we yet know that there is no such thing as post-war “adjustment”?

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