...He's my brother. I actually saw a film some years ago whose title has faded from memory, but the denouement had one young man carrying his brother in his arms with the words from the well-known song. I may have forgotten the movie, but I remember the scene.
There have been dozens -- nay hundreds -- of movies about the rivalry between brothers and the complexities of their relationship. Come to think of it, there have been plenty of films about sisters as well, but we're looking at brothers today. The topic rose its head when I finally got around to clearing two films that have been lurking on my hard disc "Blood Ties" and "Out of the Furnace", both from 2013. However not only are both movies about pairs of brothers (Clive Owen and Billy Crudup in the first and Christian Bale and Casey Affleck in the second) but they have an eerie number of points in common. Both feature ridiculously starry casts for what turns out to be fairly generic film-making, both families have long-dead mothers and on-their-deathbed fathers, amusingly both feature Zoe Saldana as a love interest, and both have scary baddies to deal with (Belgian actor Mathias Schoenaerts as Saldana's jailed ex and Woody Harrelson in all-out psycho-mode, a far cry from the Woody of "Cheers".)
"Blood Ties" directed by Guillame Canet is a remake of a French flick and is set in the 1970s, although it could just as easily have been contemporary, while the setting for "Furnace" is a dying Pennsylvania steel town where Bale accepts his fate of working at the mill for as long as the mill manages to keep operating. Affleck has just returned from four tours of duty in Afghanistan and wants more from life. It's "Deer Hunter" country and were Affleck a Vietnam vet this film too could be a nod to the 70s.
The two storylines however are decidedly different. "Blood Ties" deals with the old cliché of a career criminal brother (Owen) having a career cop for a brother. Crudup is trying to make a go of it with Saldana -- the jailed Schoenaerts' Ex. He wants to help the just-released con make a fresh start, especially since his own temerity as a youngster caused big brother's first arrest; but Owen can't hack it in the straight world. He's soon involved in contract killing, drugs, and prostitution. Brotherly love continues to exist between the pair, but it's repressed, and it only surfaces at the film's denouement, when this relatively slow-going movie suddenly becomes rather more dramatic. James Caan, Noah Emmerich, Marion Cotillard, Mila Kunis, and Lili Taylor round out this all-star production.
As for Bale and Affleck, supported by Sam Shepard, Willem Defoe, Forest Whitaker, and the aforementioned Harrelson and Saldana, their deep feelings for each other are never put in doubt. However when Bale is briefly jailed for driving under the influence, Affleck decides that he can make more money with outlawed bare-knuckle fighting than trudging to the mill each day. He bullies local crook Dafoe into introducing him to hillbilly bad guy Harrelson in the wilds of New Jersey (?) with his gang of Appalachian outlaws and they both end up dead dead dead. Bale despairs that the local police won't take their finger out to help him find the initially just missing Affleck. When he learns that his brother is dead, revenge becomes his mission, through to the somewhat confusing final scene. This film is from director Scott Cooper, four years after directing Jeff Bridges to an Oscar in "Crazy Heart", and he gets good value from his A-list cast. It was possibly the tighter and better-made film of the two, although neither is likely to linger long in my memory.
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