The Sisters Brothers (Review)
The Sisters Brothers Prove to Be Some of the Craziest Gunslingers Around.
It’s been a while since we’ve gotten a good western in theaters and luckily The Sisters Brothers made the wait well worth it. While the film embraces many of the elements that audiences have come to know and love when it comes to the genre, the end result is a far cry from anything I could have been expecting. There are plenty of shootouts, dusty trails, and lots of cowboy hats, The Sisters Brothers is much more focused on exploring these incredibly deep characters, their relationships and the consequences of who they are. Needless to say, this is a far cry from the Clint Eastwood classics of yesteryear.
John C. Riley and Joaquin Phoenix are the infamous Sisters Brothers. A pair of notorious assassins working for a mysterious Commodore who’s ruthlessness is only outmatched by his greed. The two take off after a chemist (Riz Ahmed, who you might recognize from Venom) with a formula that will revolutionize the future of gold prospecting. Despite the fact that the duo are the best at what they do, that doesn’t stop them from managing to get in each other’s way more than any other outlaw on the West Coast.
Director Jacques Audiard pairs with screenwriter Thomas Bidegain to bring the novel by Patrick DeWitt to the big screen. What astounds me is how familiar and yet new The Sisters Brothers is. While so many westerns focus on manly men of few words, the “heroes” at the center of this tale are squabbling man-children with more than they’re fair share of emotional baggage. Luckily, Audiard plays his cards close to the vest and lets the history behind the brothers trickle out slowly, which creates an incredible contrast between these two characters. Just for good measure, the men that the Sisters Brothers are after (Ahmed and Jake Gyllenhaal) share a somewhat similar dynamic, which serves to emphasize the differences between the brothers. It’s because of this that The Sisters Brothers is a character study within a western filled with contrasts.
Riley and Phoenix are tremendous as the titular brothers in this film. Of course, Phoenix is no stranger to tackling intensely violent roles (such as the one in You Were Never Really Here from earlier this year). So, the role of the quick shooting, hard-drinking brother who simply reacts rather than thinks is a walk in the park for him and even still he manages to make it look good. However, it’s Riley who truly shines as the brother with not only a good head on his shoulders but with an actual conscience. While he might play the loveable doofus more often than not in films, Riley takes those qualities and still makes himself a believable killer. He’s the kind of man who doesn’t want to kill you but sure as hell will if you threaten him or those he cares about. Throw them together and you have an enabler who is just about at the end of his rope who proves to be the focal piece of this film. Of course, this spells a recipe for disaster.
One thing that threw me for a loop with The Sisters Brothers is that it plays very much like a novel rather than a film. What I mean by that is that there are typically three acts that make up a movie. However, The Sisters Brothers feels much more like it’s made up of a series of chapters that don’t necessarily translate into acts. It creates a very different feel to the film because it’s impossible to tell where you are in the story at any given time. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because this is a movie about the moments that the two brothers have together that define their relationships by the end of the film. Because of this, The Sisters Brothers moves at a brisk pace but never forgets the importance of its actual pacing.
The Sisters Brothers is a tremendous film, but not one without more than a few unpleasant moments. It features scenes of intense violence and even gore. However, it never feels gratuitous. Instead, this is a film that embodies the hardships of the 1850’s. Men killed each other over card games, people bathed once a fortnight, and there were no OSHEA standards. Because of this people got hurt and people died and that’s the world these characters inhabit, and Jacques Audiard captures that perfectly. Don’t be fooled though, this is not a funny world, though the characters in it are certainly an odd bunch.
