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Jim Sheridan’s new effort Brothers may never fully overcome an odd pedigree—it’s a Hollywood melodrama based upon a challenging and dour Danish film—but  it provides enough dramatic substance and top-shelf acting to justify its existence as a remake. Following the lives of two brothers, Sam and Tommy Cahill, the film documents what happens when an emotionally damaged war vet (Sam) is re-introduced to a life and family that have learned to cope without him.

At the center of Brothers, sits an uneasy triangle: Tommy, the ex-con brother, has bonded with Sam’s distraught wife Gracie and his two daughters after they received news of Sam’s disappearance in Afghanistan. When Sam comes home, he returns a different, fractured person and violent tendencies rise to the surface when he finds his brother encroaching upon all that he loves.

Everything about Brothers screams emotional manipulation and its presence this late in the season seems suspiciously like the work of a studio trawling for Academy Awards. That, and the fact it is far more polished and less immediate than the film it adapts, are its crosses to bear. I adore Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan and he has splendidly handled put-upon family units dealing with fracture in several of his own films; In America and In The Name of the Father spring immediately to mind. Here, he is limited to a screenplay that takes a tantalizing topic and reduces it to the Cliff’s Notes version of a complex story. His solution is no doubt one the film’s producers hoped he would find, placing the burden of Brothers in the hands of his capable trio of headline actors.

It makes perfect sense to me that Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire could play brothers, but this relational connection doesn’t exist to give them a crutch for interaction; instead, it’s there specifically to provide the one point of collision that these otherwise disparate men share. What each does in the film couldn’t be more different from the other. Maguire gets the trickier and flashier role as the unstable Sam, and he imbues it with all the mistrust, paranoia and self-pity that it requires. He also brings Sam’s humanity to the fore in a way that prevents the movie from being a flimsy thriller about a potential psychopath. Gyllenhaal has the thankless role of playing the black sheep who turns out to be the only port in a familial storm that reaches back past him-and-Sam all the way through to their father, depicted by Sam Shepherd with the usual grizzled majesty.

At the script level, Brothers has been designed to be an acting showcase in which two male actors can emotionally spar with one another over a woman. The secret key that allows the film to come into its own as a worthy dramatic presence is that Sheridan identifies the wife as the most interesting and strongest of the three. The casting of Natalie Portman seems dubious at first, but she is the film’s revelation. She takes Grace and makes her a woman of practical and maternal strength. When she thinks Sam is dead, she does not retreat, but instead wraps her family—in her definition this includes even extended, cast-off members like Tommy—in a shielding embrace. Portman doesn’t rely on the girl-next-door appeal or her signature pout to get her through. She keeps Grace constantly on her toes, interacting with both men in a manner befitting her connection to them. It gets tricky, but she is the glue holding it all together.

At the end of the day, Brothers is a worthwhile film that just might be as good as it could be, given the limitations it has going in. Dealing with the consequences of wartime trauma, family dysfunction, and psychological deterioration is heavy stuff for any film. The fact it has been marketed as a would-be thriller probably won’t help its chances of finding a forgiving audience. But Sheridan and his cast manage to perform a terrific feat; they pull Brothers out of the Oscar Bait muck and set it down as a charged study of social and emotional estrangement.

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