“I lost a lot of my joy”: the movie that almost broke Tobey Maguire
As America’s president of dubious morals and tiny hands mulls over the idea of sending young US soldiers to their death over in Iran, it’s a reminder of how politicians don’t change, how humans rarely learn from mistakes no matter how many times they happen and that war is a machine that has to keep turning in order to make enough money for people that already have plenty.
Hollywood has long reflected these issues back at us, through every modern conflict, with one example being 2009’s Brothers with Tobey Maguire.
At that point, America was eight years into its longest war yet, the 20-year invasion of Afghanistan that was launched by George W Bush as a reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Those attacks on the US in September 2001 cost 2,977 American lives, and their response to it in the Middle East as part of the ‘axis of evil’ cost the lives of more than 7,000 US military men and women.
Those that made it back to America faced the age-old issues of post-traumatic stress disorders, a lack of support, a lack of funding, anger issues, disillusionment, alcoholism and drug addiction, the same as after WW2, Vietnam and the first war in Iraq, with suicide rates of veterans in the United States now standing at 6,000 annually.
Brothers, directed by My Left Foot’s Jim Sheridan, tells the story of one such veteran who is presumed dead after a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, before being rescued and sent home to live with his ex-convict brother, now living with his estranged wife.
Maguire’s performance as the troubled soldier earned him a Golden Globe nomination, but he struggled mentally while making the film, which saw him star opposite Jake Gyllenhaal. He told LA Times: “I lost a lot of my joy while doing the movie. I wasn’t even aware of it. I don’t mean it to sound goofy or artsy or something, but two days before we wrapped, I started telling some jokes and laughing, whatever, and it was like a release for me. I hadn’t done that in, like, two months.”
The movie, which also featured Natalie Portman and the late Sam Shepard, received mixed reviews but was a moderate success at the box office, and was actually a remake of a 2004 Danish film called Brodre, both movies taking inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey, soon to be released as a movie from Christopher Nolan. Maguire would take an extended break from making films after the release of Brothers, only making one mainstream movie until 2013’s The Great Gatsby alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.
He also had a 14-year gap without appearing in the world of Spider-Man between 2007’s Spider-Man 3 and 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, but he is reportedly about to become the web-slinger once again for the upcoming Marvel extravaganza, Avengers: Doomsday, in December of this year. There’s also some speculation that he could possibly reunite with his original trilogy director, Sam Raimi, for a fourth Spider-Man movie.
This July meanwhile will see Tom Holland return as Spidey for Spider-Man Brand New Day, which isn’t expected to feature Maguire, or the other retired Spidey Andrew Garfield, who this week said that “I think it’s a question that’s probably going to follow me for the rest of my life, ‘Are you secretly in the new Spider-Man film?’…Until I’m 90 years old, they’re going to be asking me, ‘Are you in the new Spider-Man Volume 512?’”
