Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: Brotherhood

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they hold a kegger to discuss their feelings and thoughts. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week we’ll be discussing Brotherhood. This debut indie thriller won the audience award at SXSW. It’s about a fraternity pledge whose night spirals out of control after he’s convinced by his bros to rob a convenience store.

Next Week: The Way Back – Peter Weir directs this tale of WWII labor camp escapees trying to cross Siberia, The Gobi Desert, and The Himalayas on foot. Stars include Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, and Jim Sturgess.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW!

Jeremiah White: Brotherhood is a tight, well-acted, breathlessly paced thriller. The atmosphere of intensity and immediacy is established from the first scene when a van full of frat pledges is forced to hold up convenience stores. After one attempt goes awry, the brothers and pledges spend the rest of this short movie running damage control. And doing a pretty lousy job of it.

It’s an accomplished slice of filmmaking, and an impressive feature debut for director Will Canon. Yet, in the end, it feels a bit slight. Much like recent IMC selection Cold Weather, I respect the craftsmanship and enjoyed the movie, but it seems to lack a certain something that would make it feel essential, or at least more substantial. I’m not sure what that something is, but I’ve got a few ideas.

The houseful of impulsive frat boys is entertaining but offers no truly interesting or memorable characters. These kids never have a plan significantly better than just calling the cops and coming clean, especially considering the ticking clock they are dealing with, which makes them all seem pretty dumb to go along with this. The relentless pace produces an exciting experience, but also one that lacks variety and dynamism.

This isn’t a list of things that are wrong with Brotherhood. To some extent, they all work in the film’s favor. Brotherhood is certainly well realized, but it’s hard for me not to imagine how it could have been more. Then again, it is a movie entirely populated by Greeks, that isn’t about Greek life. Brotherhood doesn’t judge the whole Greek system one way or the other. It just uses one particular group as a case study in unreasonable loyalty, mob mentality and really poor decision-making. It’s a movie about a fraternity that could have been about any tightly knit group fueled by self-interest. Seeing as how there aren’t many characters in cinema more frequently stereotyped than frat boys, maybe that’s a worthwhile accomplishment all its own.

I only signed up for keg stands and date rape, bro!

Jeff Hart:  I don’t agree that Canon withholds judgment on fraternities. Brotherhood couldn’t have been about any tight knit group fueled by self-interest, because only fraternities provide the right mixture of dim-witted hierarchical chest-thumping and young males feeling invincible. I don’t think it’s meant merely as a cruel irony that the frat pledge that sexually humiliates a girl in the opening scene ends up a vomit-covered dead body forgotten in the trunk of a car by the film’s end. That subplot is a condemnation; would they have remembered that kid even if there hadn’t been a gunshot victim to cover-up? Probably not. Is letting someone talk you into belting handles in the locked trunk of a car all that different from torturing a grocery store clerk in the frathouse basement? Well, maybe a little.

Brotherhood is definitely Canon’s way of exploring misplaced loyalty and pack mentality in young men. These meatheads are looking for more than just parties, even if they don’t realize it. They want camaraderie, they want structure, and they want someone like Jon Foster’s frat-Svengali Frank to guide them. The power-struggle between Frank and his would be protégé Adam (Trevor Morgan) is like a one night crash course in disillusionment. Naïve Adam realizes that his chosen leader, no matter how convincing he might seem, is far from the smartest guy in the room.

Adam’s struggle to at first save the fraternity from itself and, later, to break free of the institution that’s engulfed him, adds another element of tension to a thriller that’s already got its screws in tight. Brotherhood is an adrenaline rush from the opening scene. Admirably, it doesn’t rely on any cute “show the ending first, then flashback” tricks, it just dumps you headlong into the action. Even ignoring all the commentary on how young males are dumb as shit, you’ve still got one of the most nail-biting thrillers I can remember seeing in quite some time.