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THE SISTERS BROTHERS
Director: Jacques Audiard Cast: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rebecca Root, Allison Tolman, Carol Kane, Rutger Hauer MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:01 Release Date: 9/21/18 (limited); 9/28/18 (wider) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 27, 2018 The Sisters Brothers is a story of the Old West that seems to take place in between the lines of a typical variety of Western. None of the central characters is your usual hero or villain, most especially the eponymous protagonists. They're neither lawmen nor outlaws. Within the context of a Western, both of those roles imply something larger than life. These men are very small, indeed. We can't even see them in the shot that introduces them, but then again, we can't see much of anything in the movie's opening shot. It's a wide shot of a pitch black wilderness—that much we can deduce. The only light comes from the flashes of pistol barrels, after the Sisters Brothers have announced their presence to a cabin filled with men. If we go by traditional Western storytelling, this is either an attempted arrest or a raid. Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix) are definitely looking for someone in the cabin, but they don't seem the law-abiding types. After the shootout, with the house filled with dead or dying men, the Sisters start looking for the man by the light of a lantern. The dead men are checked and ignored. The brothers check the dying men, and whether they're the brothers' man or not, they put an end to the moans and cries for help with a single bullet. What we come to learn is that Eli and Charlie are essentially little more than hired guns—henchmen, goons, thugs, or whatever you might want to call them—for the Commodore (Rutger Hauer), the head of a criminal organization known only as the League. The brothers have no code of ethics or conduct or anything of that matter. They're paid to kill and occasionally to torture, if the man in the nice building with the fancy logo in Oregon City calls for such action. They do it because they're good at it—the best, if their infamy is any sign of success. The brothers have been at it for so long that there's nothing else for them to do, either. These are intriguing characters. In your usual Western, they'd be the men who stand between the main hero and villain. We wouldn't get to know anything about them, except that they're formidable opponents for the hero and loyal enough to the villain to die in his service. Here, the screenplay by director Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain (based on Patrick DeWitt's novel) gives them much more depth, even as the story itself seems to have little idea about what to do with the novelty of its premise. Eli is the conflicted of the brothers, hoping to get out of this life of wandering and murder—to settle down with the school teacher who gave him a perfumed shawl at one point and maybe to open up a shop with his younger brother. Charlie scoffs at the concept of normalcy. He wasn't born for this kind of life, we eventually learn, but he was bred into it by way of a cruel, drunk S.O.B. of a father. The fate of the brothers' old man is left for the late in the movie. It's not much of a shock, but it helps to explain how Charlie came to be a killer and why Eli has stuck around for as long as he has—well past the point, it seems, that he could make anything else of his life. The plot has the brothers going after a prospector who allegedly stole from the Commodore. The story includes that prospector, named Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), and John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), a private detective hired by the Commodore to track down Hermann and detain him until the Sisters arrive. The main complication is that Hermann isn't a thief. Instead, the Commodore wants the prospector's secret formula for a chemical that can illuminate gold in the water. John abandons his mission and flees to San Francisco with Hermann, hoping to find enough gold to start a utopia in Texas. Most of the movie has Eli and Charlie making their way toward Hermann, encountering some dangers in the wild (an off-screen bear attack and a venomous spider that crawls into Eli's mouth) and some unsavory folks among civilization. Audiard and Bidegain basically repeat the same simple themes and character beats: Eli wants out but is devoted to his brother, and Charlie is a violent alcoholic. Some of the material is played with subdued humor, but for the most part, it's about the broad strokes of two men who keep getting into and causing trouble, because that's the kind of men they are. The third act of The Sisters Brothers changes things a bit, giving the two parties an opportunity to get what they want (The nature of at least one character ensures that such potential fortune is short-lived) and ending with an extended chase that hammers home the point that violence is a constant for these men. The brothers may be a different breed of Western protagonist, but by the end, we mostly understand why such characters are usually relegated to the backdrop of such stories. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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