"A heartwarming tale of murder," reads Brother's Keeper's tagline, which would be hopelessly glib if it weren't largely the truth. A celebration of brotherly love in the form of a documentary about a possible mercy killing, the new-to-DVD 1992 film Brother's Keeper examines the lives of the four Ward brothers, who live and sleep together in a dilapidated shack in rural New York, eking out a meager living off the land. They're the kind of simple, mostly illiterate men folks refer to as boys—sometimes with a quiver of self-consciousness, sometimes not—even though they look like caricatures of grizzled old men. The fringe of the fringe, the Wards were mostly looked upon by their neighbors as harmless eccentrics until Delbert Ward was accused of suffocating his ailing older brother William. At that point, townsfolk rallied around Delbert, holding dances to raise money for him and defending his character to outside media interlopers like Connie Chung, who arrived at the Ward brothers' shack in a limousine. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's warmly affectionate directorial debut engenders an enormous amount of sympathy for the Wards (who were so smitten with their chroniclers that they named turkeys after them), but to their credit, the film is ambiguous about Delbert's ultimate guilt or innocence.

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At first look, Delbert and his brothers seem unlikely candidates for a documentary. However, while their lifestyle may not be all that appealing to those of us used to the modern comforts of civilization, the Wards are warm, likable people, and, during the course of this one-hundred minute feature, we come to care about them. The murder trial is just a springboard for several fascinating character studies. Berlinger and Sinofsky should be given ample credit for what they have managed to accomplish here -- the most engaging documentary since The Thin Blue Line.

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