Next of kin

There's no question that Takeshi Kitano can be counted among the elite of today's cinema auteurs, though the critical response that reached its ecstatic peak with 1997's Fireworks seems to have died down a bit with subsequent efforts. The novelty has worn off, and his zen explorations through violent underworlds appear a little too familiar to achieve the same impact the second or third time around. It is true that Brother, his latest, is in many respects a spiritual twin to his earlier masterpiece, but that's hardly reason to discount such an effective, and affecting, film.

Brother follows Yamamoto, played by Takeshi himself, an exiled yakuza who transplants his gangster mentality to the United States. The silent, inscrutable foreigner begins working his way through the criminal hierarchy with his drug-pusher brother, and quickly overtakes his rivals. He is ruthless and cold-blooded, and yet never comes off as an excessively cruel or unsympathetic character.

Where the soulful Fireworks was about finding, or earning, a satisfactory conclusion, Brother explores the cyclical area of perpetual motion. The characters find purpose in the perpetuation and logical progression of their gangster ideal; each action, each sacrifice, represents a significant contribution to a greater whole. Their criminal family is their religion. And this is what dictates the broad strokes, the gangster shit: their tasks, being obvious and morally clear, are enacted without hesitation. They keep moving forward, tearing through the ranks of gangland America, building on everything until it seems they have built too high. The near-invincible Italians topple the ambitious Japanese, as expected. Yamamoto and his partners mourn for fallen comrades (in an incredibly bloody finale, nearly everyone dies), but the forward momentum is maintained, at any level of sacrifice.

Crime gives these lives structure, so Takeshi adheres much closer to the genre conventions that provide the skeleton for his film. But buried inside that existentialist indifference is a wry sense of humanity, a kind of kinship and love that can develop between men in the bloodiest of circumstances. They aren't evil because Takeshi's characters inhabit a world in which everything except honor and loyalty exist outside of morality, and in those respects the men are unshakeable. They bond in a way virtually unknown to American audiences, not based on shared experience, but mutual respect and admiration. Grown men sharing substantial relationships. The details of Brother consist of very touching, very true friendships that give a gangster's life another kind of meaning and purpose, and Takeshi sees no conflict between the two.