Two Brothers
They're advertising the sprocket holes off "Two Brothers" on Nickelodeon and other high-traffic kid zones, so chances are your children are already begging to see the new fictional animal flick from the director of "The Bear." Cute tiger cubs for them, cute Guy Pearce for mom -- what's not to like?
"Two Brothers" turns out to be quite a bit tougher than its warm and fuzzy commercials indicate, though, and what's not to like for younger children may be the film's grim insistence on the suffering wild animals experience at the hands of man. If they had trouble when Bambi's mom died, they may be blubbering basket cases after this movie's parade of cages, tiger skins, and human cruelty. Older kids, teenagers, and grown-ups, on the other hand, may be ready to entertain a sober, engrossing fable about two cubs separated in captivity and reunited after encounters with people both kind and callous. Set in the colonial outposts of Cambodia during the 1930s -- when wildlife conservation was a lunatic notion and the only good tiger was a dead one -- "Two Brothers" views its characters and their actions through today's comparatively enlightened vantage point. Translation: Tigers may be the planet's fiercest predators, but it's men who are the killers.
The film opens in the magnificent ruins of Angkor in northern Cambodia, where a tiger and her mate give birth to two cubs we'll come to know as Sangha and Kumal. Relic hunters are overrunning the area, and in the collision between man and animal, the father is shot and Kumal taken in by Aidan McRory (Pearce), a famous Great White Hunter in the mold of Frank Buck (go ahead, Google him, I dare you).
The cub is taken from the hunter and ends up in a traveling circus, where he's caged and beaten by the tamer (Vincent Scarito) and the even more sadistic fire-eater (Moussa Maaskri). Kumal's only companion is an aging tiger known as Bloody Caesar, the feline equivalent of a jailhouse old-timer.
McRory has always been in it for the thrill and the money, but as he keeps reuniting with the growing tiger over the years, his eyes are slowly opened. (In one of the film's sillier subplots, he's also broadened by his love for a local chieftain's daughter, played by Mai Anh Le). Sangha, meanwhile, has seen his mother shot and wounded, then been adopted by Raoul (Freddie Highmore), the young son of a buffoonish colonial administrator (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), who sells him to the private zoo of an effete local prince (Oanh Nguyen). When the two brothers finally meet again -- well, I won't spoil it. Let's just say you'll be rooting for the home team.
"The Bear" was a little too cutesy for my taste, but director Jean-Jacques Annaud gets the tone right this time: The two grown tigers have distinct personalities without being anthropomorphized into furry people. That this was achieved using a total of 30 different tigers -- plus a few animatronic ones -- is even more remarkable. Shot mostly on high-definition video, with digital editing used to place animals harmlessly into situations that look otherwise, "Two Brothers" is told with a simplicity that's only occasionally simpleminded.
By design, the film's animals are more vivid than its humans -- Pearce is dashing but barely registers with the oomph he has shown elsewhere -- and that somehow seems fitting for a species that, as the end titles inform us, have dwindled in number from 100,000 a century ago to 5,000 today."Two Brothers" honors the power and beauty of these beasts even as it underscores the cultured savagery of the men who are crowding them out.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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