Movie Mondays: Brothers Movie Makes Powerful Statement About PTSD

This movie has been on my radar a while, but just watched it a few days ago partly because my husband  is oddly jealous of Jake Gyllenhaal. It was interesting watching him play a bad boy because I always see him as more of the mischievous yet harmless type even when he played a womanizer at the beginning of Love and Other Drugs (another excellent movie).
Yet, he does pull off the bad boy, a brother recently released from jail and constantly compared to his Marine captain brother played by a gaunt Tobey Maguire. I liked the interaction between these two, but I didn't really buy his relationship with Natalie Portman. I thought Portman and Gyllenhaal had a lot more chemistry. Maguire has never impressed me when it comes to playing opposite his love interests (Spiderman, anyone?).
The plot is based on an important issue that we as a society continually push under the rug--PTSD. I know people who haven't recovered from their time in Vietnam, and I know soldiers who have returned from our current ten-year war forever traumatized. The integration process for returning has not been perfected to say the least, and it is an issue that this movie addressed head-on.
I expected a different plot twist then the small indiscretion that takes place, and I felt like this movie could have had a deeper emotional impact; it seemed to just scratch the surface. The most powerful scene was when one of the daughters throws a tantrum at her sister's birthday, telling Maguire that she wished he never came back, referencing how cold and distant he had been since returning from Afghanistan. Maguire also destroys the kitchen his brother rebuilds while he is away out of spite which brilliantly shows the crippling power of PTSD.