Siblings cast shadows. They provide comparison. It’s an old story. In fact it’s as old as time.
Every artform has used brotherly bloodlines to explore expectations, jealousy of stature or favor ever since the biblical tale of the first murder: Cain killing his brother Abel.
I worked at a bookstore in Maryville, Tennessee when Oprah put her discussion ready label back on onto book jackets. It had been more than a year since she’d brandished her “big O.”
“When the book club ended a year ago, I said I would bring it back when I found the book that was moving,” Oprah said in 2002. “And [East of Eden] is a great one… We think it might be the best novel we’ve ever read!”
The day that East of Eden was reissued for Oprah’s Club a number of people stood outside the store waiting. They filed in and got lost. A woman came up to me and said, “I looked all over the new release section and couldn’t find East of Eden.”
I smiled.
Honey, that story is as old as time itself.
Since the heavens boomed with the promise of a life of public shame for Cain via a mark on his face, filmmakers have – like novelists, operatists, cartoonists, and The Boss – revisited the tale of sibling rivals. (Confession: I re-familiarized myself by watching an animated bible video. Abel was blonde and tended to the sheep, so soft was his demeanor. Cain had a drunkard’s drawl and unkempt demeanor. Ripped like Conan the Barbarian).
In honor of Thor: The Dark World, which is released this week, here is a selection of films concerning brothers jealous of brothers, brothers taking the fall for their brothers, and like Thor himself, brothers needing the help of their brother, who for all that is entwined in the Norse God himself, is the last person he’d like to ask the help of.
And after the first film and The Avengers we can understand Chris Hemsworth’s (Thor’s) jealousy. That Tom Hiddleston is damn charismatic.
If something here is over heralded or casts too long of a shadow over an overlooked film, by all means, be a brother about it. Tell me how I’m wrong.
Brian Formo is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrianEmilFormo.
The Top 20 Movies About Brothers
Go beyond Thor: The Dark World with the 20 best movies ever made about brothers.
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20. Stuck on You (2003)
After such a terrible string of films it’s hard to remember that The Farrelly Brothers were plucky and reliably watchable. This comedic twins selection (sorry, Twins), concerns conjoined twins. Greg Kinnear wants to be an actor, but his shared body-mate Matt Damon is too shy. Sure the Farrelly’s miss some jokes, but they knock some out of the park. This was the last film with a pulse from The Farrelly Brothers, and it also approached perfectionist body issues with more heart than their previous film, Shallow Hal.
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19. You're Next (2013)
A dinner party has a number of meta-winks to lower budget horror fans. Joe Swanberg makes fun of his sister’s date (played by Ti West, director of the terrific House of the Devil) for directing low budget films that play at the Cleveland Underground Film Festival. Swanberg (a mumblecore alum who directed a segment of V/H/S and the more recent Drinking Buddies, with y’know, some actual movie stars) tells West what no director wants to hear: all creativity is in commercials these days. Director Adam Wingard gets a laugh for not only staging that “insider’s only” scene (and the carnage that ensues after) but also for staging some creative kills in a horror sub-genre (the home invasion film) that was beginning to feel incredibly stale.
Oh yeah, and the brothers are pretty fucked up.
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18. House of Strangers (1949)
This film noir has the tough family motto of “Never forgive, never forget” and is based on the book I’ll Never Go Home Anymore. Both are pretty tough statements from a film where four brothers learn to trust each other. But they do let their father rot in jail.
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17. Rudo y Cursi (2008)
Wait, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna weren’t brothers in Y Tu Mama Tambien? Well they were in Carlos Cuaron’s film. Produced by Alfonso Cuaron (Carlos’ brother, director of Y Tu Mama Tambien, Gravity), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros) and Guillermo Del Toro (The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth) Rudo y Cursi is one big Mexican family of filmmakers. It’s Blow plus futbol.
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16. Rocco and His Brothers (1960)
Milan is almost more at the forefront of this tale than the titular Rocco and his titular brothers. The brothers’ family moves for industrial work and find it to be a cold, impersonal place. Two brothers fall in love with a prostitute. One of them makes one of the most misguided, awful attempts at keeping family together, in the history of cinema.
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15. Boyz N the Hood (1991)
Half-brothers, hood edition. Ice Cube’s Doughboy and Morris Chestnut’s Ricky are maternal brothers. Their relationship is the different time, different place, different politics inverse of Brando and Malden in On the Waterfront: one just got out of jail and is in a gang, the other tries to avoid the gangs through getting an athletic scholarship. Boyz is now dated (especially with Ice Cube morphing into the Rick Moranis go-to-family-movie-actor as of late), but it is no less powerful than it was in 1991. America still “don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s goin’ on in the Hood.”
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14. Barry Lyndon (1975)
Half-brothers, costume edition. The titular character’s rise through the British social class is undone by the very public adult spanking he lays on his wife’s son after said son uses his half-brother as a pawn in the very public shaming of his stepfather. Name another film where oversized clogs cause the downturn of a stitched together family.
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13. A River Runs Through It (1992)
A Brad Pitt brothers opus has to be somewhere on this list, and for me, the fly-fishing, banjo-playing, floppy-hat wearing Pitt wins over the romance novel cover Pitt of Legends of the Fall. Inconsistencies in the strictness of the boys’ preacher father (Tom Skerritt) create one rebellious journalist (Pitt) and one reserved schoolteacher (Craig Sheffer).
It’s also worth noting that director Robert Redford crafted another great family drama in Ordinary People, where one son lives in the shadow of the dead older brother. Ordinary People is too often scolded for defeating Raging Bull at the Academy Awards, but it is an excellent melodrama. A River Runs Through It cemented Redford’s familial tone. And, capitalizing on Thelma & Louise, gave us a certified star in Brad Pitt, who’d go on to emotionally stunt his own children in The Tree of Life.
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12. The Indian Runner (1991)
Sean Penn played the elder Jack in The Tree of Life, but he mostly wanders through Houston skyscrapers and the desert thinking of his dead younger brother. Twenty years prior to that film he made his writing/directing debut in this adaptation of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Highway Patrolman.” The song spells out most of the story, but just like The Boss’ bar tale, this one is nicely strummed by Penn, Viggo Mortensen and David Morse.
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11. Before the Devil Knows Your Dead (2007)
While Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke make unlikely brothers, it is believable that a) Marisa Tomei’s first nude appearance on celluloid would create jealousy between them and b) that Hoffman, already the dominating Master, would be resentful of how easy things were for Hawke, the original Slacker and c) that their scheme of robbing their parents wouldn’t go as planned.
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10. Gattaca (1997)
Competition with a brother is hard enough, but what if your brother was genetically modified to perfection? Within this list there are a number climactic showdowns between brothers, Gattaca is refreshingly non-violent; true strength is determined by a swim off. Like Ethan Hawke’s Vincent, writer/director Andrew Niccol must have put all of his being into this feat of strength, as the rest of his directed films do not have the humanity of this one underrated sci-fi film.
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9. Ran (1985)
The final epic by master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa opens with a father dividing up his kingdom to his three sons. The father shows that three arrows cannot be broken as easily as one. One of his sons takes the three arrows and breaks them over his knee and calls the lesson stupid. This sort-of-adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear finds Kurosawa in different mode: instead of his samurai films where characters die attempting good, the deaths in Ran are selfish, futile and isolating.
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8. A History of Violence (2005)
In a just world “Jesus, Joey” would become as identifiable a dialogue as, “It was you, Fredo.” William Hurt only gets one scene (and one helluva beard) to nail the lofty older brother, but nail it he does.
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7. The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)
So many cons on this list! Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern are the scheming brothers. Ellen Burstyn is a bitter former beauty queen. That was just a list of reasons of why you should see this movie. Oh and it might’ve well’ve informed Bruce Springsteen’s song “Atlantic City.”
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6. Shoot the Piano Player (1960)
An early French New Wave film from François Truffaut, director of The 400 Blows (one of the best films from an adolescent’s point of view); a piano player is forced to confront his brothers when they seek refuge at the bar he plays in while hiding out from gangsters. The film opens as if the brothers were strangers. A saloon of strangers.
This pop-noir was an influence on the hitman chattiness re-appropriated by Quentin Tarantino, and the 70s James Toback film Fingers, which was remade as the French film The Beat My Heart Skipped by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone).
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5. Dead Ringers (1988)
Twins! Jeremy Irons gives a brilliant performance as twin gynecologists who share the same lovers when one tires of them. It’s creepy and parts of it are true. Also true is that Irons had two dressing rooms -- one for each character, and he mixed the wardrobe into one dressing room so that he was always a little unaware of which twin he was playing.
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4. On the Waterfront (1954)
Before making East of Eden, Kazan made On the Waterfront. It is a master class of storytelling that is now overshadowed knowing that Kazan made the film as a way to explain why he named names to McCarthy during the hearings held by the House of Un-American Activities committee. Despite his justifications, there’s a great story, a great Brando performance and one great speech that we all seem to know: “I coulda been a contender. I coulda had class. I coulda been somebody. Instead of a bum. Which is what I am.”
What we often forget is that speech is delivered to Brando’s older brother (the great Rod Steiger). A brother that had his younger brother throw fights for money. A brother that got him involved in crime. And ultimately a brother that sacrificed himself when confronted with how his selfish gains stunted his younger brother, and made him “a bum.”
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3. Adaptation. (2002)
Twins! Nicolas Cage is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in two bodies. Charlie is the socially stunted, over-thinking but brilliant screenwriter of Being John Malkovich; his brother Donald is a Hollywood hack. The film explores the relationship from author to subject and how each informs the other. It’s so good there’s truth and laughs from meta (and real) masturbation.
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2. The Tree of Life (2011)
The earth is formed. The oceans crash. A dinosaur has empathy for another dying dinosaur and then three boys vie for the attention of their father. They too learn to have empathy for each other.
There’s limited dialogue in Tree of Life, but the brothers get many fantastic scenarios to show their commonality and differences. They hunt with bb guns, break into a neighbor woman’s house and mimic men they encounter on the streets. They also ask forgiveness by offering to let the other hit them with a makeshift paddle.
The Tree of Life certainly has its detractors, but those who love it, love it for the brother dynamic. It’s a poem of images, not words, but the word that is said with the most frequency and urgency is “brother.”
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1. The Godfather, Part II (1974)
The whole trilogy is about family. Michael was not the one who was supposed to ascend. He was also not supposed to be betrayed.
Like this film topping a brotherhood list, sometimes the obvious is front of your face all along. And then there was one.
It was you, Michael.
