It’s abundantly possible to make a good movie with much compassion and little creativity. Brothers is such a case. As the film opens, Marine Captain Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) is about to embark on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan; his younger brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) is just getting out of the slammer. The reunion supper is tense. It’s clear which son is favored by the ex-Marine pater familias (Sam Shepard), and which son is the lifelong lubber. Sam countenances his troubled sibling, even as Sam’s wife, Grace (Natalie Portman), remains leery of her in-law. When Sam is reported to be lost in action, however, Tommy makes an attempt at reformation. He becomes for his nieces the avuncular playmate they’ve lacked, and he and his buddies remodel Grace’s shabby kitchen. Then, the inevitable: Harkening to the anodyne sounds of U2, he lights up a joint and registers surprise when goody-goody Grace partakes. She’s not just the “stuck-up” former cheerleader that he’d taken her for; and he’s more than the ruffian she’d believed him to be. Their lips share more than the pot, but their tragedy is too close behind for them to make any further advances—for now. I feel little guilt in revealing that Sam is, all the while, alive—if not well—as a prisoner of war; and that the Sam who comes home is not the same as he who left.

Brothers is a remake of a 2004 Danish film, but it seems to be a product of the Hollywood homefront of the 1940s. It’s more emotionally sophisticated than David O. Selznick’s Since You Went Away (1944)—which featured a war wife and her daughters coping with their absent patriarch—but Brothers seems set in that same universe in which small-town Americans are “elevated” by being cast as the heroic waxwork sculptures of a museum display. (Shirley Temple played one of the daughters in the World War II film.) The story is laid in an anonymous burg in the snowy part of California; the Cahills belong to a generic Protestant denomination; and the missis seems to have no life outside of her children, her husband, or his family. It’s Sarah Palin’s wet dreamworld—as blandly white as the snow. David Benioff, the screenwriter, conscripts some old-movie clichés for his characters, too: the cheerleader, the black sheep, the golden boy (a football star in high school, no less), his twinkling daughters, their gruff grampa. When Grace admits to having smoked dope and listened to U2 as a teenager, this is about as fresh a cliché-burster as the jock who joins the glee club.

Maguire, however, bursts out and then some. The director, Jim Sheridan, has likened the actor to Jimmy Stewart—and, indeed, Maguire pulls off his transition from everyman George Bailey of It’s a Wonderful Life to the warped Scottie of Vertigo. In most regards, however, I think the comparison is inapt: Maguire is, maybe, the everydork, but hardly the everyman. He’s always been likable but detached; his frosty-blue eyes seem a touch creepy for being too supernally warm—almost beatifically gentle. It’s somewhat absurd to see him as the football player/Marine (his discomfiting bulkiness was a lark when he became Spider-Man, too), but he culls from his mystical reserve; he makes a character that seems a little short of being real seem a little more than human. It’s this quality that makes him almost inscrutable; when he finally cracks up, you’re not quite prepared. When he shrieks, he’s like a girl on the wrong end of her menstrual cycle; it’s a primal howl—the evil twin of Paul Dano’s epicene squeals. Gyllenhaal is certainly well-matched physically to be Maguire’s brother—I used to think Maguire was great in October Sky—but his part is insufficiently written. His performance is fine, and he’s used well in the midsection of the movie; but he’s phased out after Sam’s homecoming, and the brothers’ relationship is thinly defined—contrary to what the title suggests. Does Sam love Tommy simply because Sam is a standup guy and compleat brother? Is Tommy a black sheep because his whole life’s been darkened by Sam’s wide shadow? When Sam confronts Tommy about his wife’s possible infidelity, the younger brother reacts indecipherably; he really hasn’t anything to hide, and yet he reeks of guilt and suspiciousness, as if he was a suburban Fredo Corleone.

Portman, unfortunately, too easily belongs to the movie’s retro framework. I’ve always found her to be a bit of a robotic actress; her mealy voice sounds like a low-oil indicator. She’s not bad, per se, but she gives a blandly conceived role the virtuous performance it deserves. When Carey Mulligan (of An Education) has her brief bit as a fallen soldier’s widow, she brings a humane softness to the movie; her tears have converted that lovely face into homely putty—beautiful in another way. Portman’s circuits are nearly exposed.

Brothers is either half-baked (the archetypes belong to a pipe-dream past) or overcooked (the plot is tendentious and closed for interpretation); and yet Sheridan’s direction is at just the right temperature. (One can forgive a few lapses of the editor’s judgment, and less obligingly, the fiddled-around-with-GarageBand soundtrack.) As with An Education, the director’s lucidity dignifies the narrative. Though more than an iota of credit is due to Maguire, Sheridan achieves in some scenes an almost intolerable fusillade of emotional currents; but you never mistrust the grip the director has on you because he plays with a fair hand. Sheridan doesn’t drape the movie in any flags or coddle its audience with simple solutions—except, arguably, at the very end. The movie has no shortage of brotherly love; and yet its characters are convenient stand-ins for people—not so much our brothers as our cousins from movieland. Brothers is a respectable effort; but it’s inbred.