‘Brother’ Review: Fate Deals an Unforgiving Hand in Director Clement Virgo’s Memorable Debut
The spirit of Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” weighs heavily, both thematically and stylistically, on “Brother,” a drama about two brothers growing up in a low-income Toronto suburb that lacks the grace and eloquence of the 2016 Best Picture Oscar winner. But even if writer-director Clement Virgo, adapting David Chariandy’s 2017 novel, can’t achieve the sustained aura of ineffable melancholy he’s striving for, the film still hits some lovely notes of grace and poignance that rise above the script’s manipulative nature.
“Brother” also benefits from sterling performances by its two leads: Lamar Johnson as the reserved teenager Michael and Aaron Pierre as his hulking older brother Francis. The two live with their overworked single mother (Marsha Stephanie Blake) in a cramped apartment in the low-income Toronto suburb of Scarborough, which is populated primarily by immigrants.
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Alternating between three timelines, the bulk of the story is set in the early 1990s, when Michael is coming of age, juggling high school with his first romantic relationship while keeping bullies at bay. Francis, a dropout who has already moved out of the family home and lives in the back of the barber shop where he works, watches over his little brother while trying to launch a career as a DJ and music promoter.
Shot in beautiful widescreen by Guy Godfree, “Brother” conveys a strong sense of place — Scarborough serves as a character the way Liberty Square was more than a backdrop in “Moonlight” — and although the movie jumps back and forth in time from scene to scene, Virgo uses subtle production design and costuming to make sure you always know what time period you are watching (the two lead actors play the same characters throughout the movie, other than childhood).
The jumbled chronological order, however, doesn’t add anything to the film other than a bloated running time. Virgo’s use of foreshadowing and dread are superfluous, since most viewers will sense where this story is headed long before it gets there. A sequence that bookends the movie of the two brothers climbing an electrical tower so they can enjoy the view from the top plays like a stray literary trope that may have been carried over from the book but ends the film on an obvious, clunky note.
Although he looks too old for his character, Pierre shares a genuine rapport with Johnson: The actors talk and communicate with the familiar shorthand of actual siblings, and the best scenes in the movie belong to them. Johnson (“The Hate U Give,” “The Last of Us”) gives the film its poetic soul. Pierre (“The Underground Railroad”) adds a dimension of tragic inevitability, especially after the film reveals a crucial aspect of his character that had been previously hidden.
In one scene, the two drive out to the suburbs to drop in unannounced on their absent father, who left the family when Michael was a baby. Told entirely in one sustained shot, the visit doesn’t go the way the brothers hoped, another instance of the world letting these young men down. (Francis is disappointed and embarrassed; Michael is relieved and happy to put the incident behind him.)
In another scene, Francis lays into his little brother over lunch, chiding him for his quiet, tentative demeanor. “You got to work on things,” Francis tells him. “You have to be cooler about things and not carry everything on your face all the time. You have to show the world you’re somebody.”
The irony is that nothing is actually going well for Francis, whose exterior confidence belies a growing dread that his hustle is a bust, and his future is looking bleak. Even as “Brother” marches toward its preordained end, it’s the two lead performances, along with Virgo’s deft handling of actors, that keeps you engaged, hoping luck takes a turn for these two young men but knowing the chances of a happy ending are slim.
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