Agnes and His Brothers (2006)
Runtime: 1 hr 55 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Martin Weiss, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup, Katja Riemann, Tom Schilling
DVD Info
Release:
Dec 19, 2006
DVD Features:
Audio:
- (unspecified) - German
- Subtitles - English - Optional
Additional Release Material:
- Trailers
Text/Photo Galleries:
- Stills/Photos
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
It's a slick, ambitious movie that doesn't always nail all the many moods and themes it's after. But the actors give it force and depth.
The film's outrageousness would be more palatable if leavened with more wit, or if the characterizations possessed more nuances.
Writer-director Oskar Roehler spends all his energy on cataloging ''outrageous' behavior, and none on giving the transgressions any meaning.
Neither Agnes nor his brothers ever feel real enough to truly shock.
some of the best acting to come out of Germany since before the Nazis took over.
In shuttling between drama and farce, more than a few balls get dropped.
[The film] isn't especially engaging, despite a quietly charismatic performance by Weiss, a relative newcomer who holds his own against far more experienced actors.
There's fierce energy and -- thanks to the performances -- affecting emotion in the movie that almost makes you forget that Rainer Werner Fassbinder told a similar story much better 28 years ago with In a Year with 13 Moons.
About halfway through, however, the story takes on more than it can handle, turning contrived and unbelievable in the process.
Whenever he takes the time to line up his toxic arrows, usually with the help of a compellingly squirmy Bleibtreu, he hits the bull's-eye.
Where Roehler spends the most time, it seems, is with Werner, whose story evolves from satiric parody to compelling family drama -- there are few scenes more satisfying than when he takes a chainsaw to his son's marijuana crop.
The feverish libidos wreaking emotional havoc in Oskar Roehler's infantile sex comedy are a quintessentially Germanic mixture of kinky, obsessive and sentimental.
It says something about Roehler's vision for Agnes And His Brothers that he didn't think much about the movie's centerpiece character, beyond the simplistic irony of having the family transsexual be the most normal.
Painfully literal/ironic soundtrack choices add to the general unpleasantness, and the nods to Fassbinder's great In a Year of 13 Moons only emphasize what this scattershot satire most decidedly is not.
Effectively mixes humor with melodrama to deliver an absorbing look at 3 brothers with enormous emotional problems.
Just as the characters are underthought, the storylines are incongruently pieced together.
While the script has the occasional hiccough, the impeccable performances of the three actors actually make us care for these dysfunctional brothers.
Related Forums

by: REEL_REVIEWER 12/22/06

by: REEL_REVIEWER 12/22/06

by: REEL_REVIEWER 12/22/06

by: REEL_REVIEWER 12/22/06


Top Critic