One Good Film: "The Sisters Brothers" (2018)
A Western from a French director? With Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly?
A regular feature for paid Watch List subscribers: I suggest one reasonably under-the-radar movie from the recent or distant past, and you do what you want with that information.
The Sisters Brothers (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, streaming on Prime, for rent at Amazon, YouTube, and elsewhere). A grubby, funny, emotionally resonant Western picaresque, with a tremendous four-cornered cast.
Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly (above) play Charlie and Eli Sisters, two murderous frontier hitmen; Riz Ahmed (“Sound of Metal”) is their quarry, Hermann Warm, a gentle chemist with a valuable invention; and Jake Gyllenhaal is John Morris, the dandified detective also on Ahmed’s trail.
The movie is part of a wave of indie Westerns from unexpected filmmakers over the past decade or so – other good ones include “Slow West” (2015) by Australia’s John Maclean, “The Homesman” (2014) from director Tommy Lee Jones, and Kelly Reichardt’s “Meeks’ Cutoff” (2011) and “First Cow” (2021). All these movies throw the genre’s verities and variations up in the air to see where they land, and all of them operate under the assumption that the American West was a place of slow-motion chaos – where European values collapsed into entropy. If you think a Frenchman, in this case the gifted Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet,” “Rust And Bone”), wouldn’t know the rules of the Western or how to play by them, that’s kind of the point: The film’s opening shoot-out takes place at night in total darkness, fields lit up by flashes of gunfire and no one having any idea what they’re shooting at. Historically speaking, that sounds about right. By coming to this landscape with fresh eyes (and ears, via Alexandre Desplat’s engagingly period-inappropriate score), “The Sisters Brothers” manages to stay true to the fundamental purpose of a Western, any Western, which is exploring the drama and/or comedy of civilization – which men rise out of savagery, which men embrace it, and what that says about them.
In my Boston Globe review, I wrote:
Of the two brothers, Charlie (Phoenix) is the louder, meaner, drunker, and more dominant — or so it seems. Eli (Reilly) is older but shyer, and he has been getting funny ideas about civilization. During a visit to a frontier town, he’s quite taken with a newfangled invention called a “toothbrush.” “The Sisters Brothers” more or less claims there are two types of men in this world, those who see the need for toothbrushes and those who haven’t yet grasped the point. …
Ahmed’s Hermann (above left) is a man of scientific mind and a decency so straightforward that we fear for his survival; Phoenix’s Charlie Sisters is his opposite, an atavistic savage. In the middle somewhere are Gyllenhaal’s finicky Morris (above right), rehearsing proper behavior to see if it’ll stick, and Reilly’s Eli, who gropes after goodness like a bear emerging from hibernation. It’s another of the satisfactions of “The Sisters Brothers” that you may realize only toward the end that Eli is the secret center of both the narrative and its larger themes. It’s a movie in which a man’s character means more than he knows and in which a great character actor comes into his own.
So, yes, another good reason to seek “The Sisters Brothers” out: It’s the rare movie to do right by John C. Reilly.
I hope you enjoy the movie! Don’t hesitate to weigh in with thoughts.
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