Pre-Civil War preview of the dynamic changes in the Wild West. It's a dark Western.
The Sisters Brothers
Grade: A-
Director: Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Dheepan)
Screenplay: Audiard, Thomas Bidegain (Rust and Bone), from Patrick Dewitt novel
Cast: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hr 1 min
By: John DeSando
The Sisters Brothers is as out there a western as its title. A mashup of Butch Cassady and Treasure of Sierra Madre, it chronicles the passing of Western romance even though it’s set in pre-Civil War 1850’s. Two brothers, Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix), are assassins on payroll of the Commodore (Rutger Hauer), trekking across 1000 miles of Oregon Desert to capture and murder a mid-eastern prospector, Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed), a dentist who has a chemical formula to extract gold from water.
Nothing good can come of rogues in search of easy gold, as Chaucer told us in the Pardoner’s Tale and John Huston in Treasure. The emphasis is on character in a film from daring French director Jacques Audiard that emphasizes the strong influence of biological family and the foolishness of greed.
Sisters Brothers highlights the changing face of expansionism that nurtures entrepreneurship along with the romance of change. The object of the brothers’ search is mid-eastern miner, Hermann, whose formula may change mining for gold forever. Like all else, the formula carries deadly side effects.
The ambivalence emerging when lawman, John Morse (Jake Gyllenhaal), joins his prey, Hermann, in a partnership guaranteed to honk off the uber boss, Commodore, is testament to the ambivalent ambitions of those wild prospectors who peopled that Westward-Ho movement. With the heavy weight of patricide and the lure of guilt-less murder, the brothers fight familial demons as well as inept gunmen. As lethal as the brothers are, they cannot avoid the pursuit of those seeking to end their reign (witness Butch and Sundance pursued by “Who are those guys?”)
Eli tells his brother about splitting from the Commodore, “We have a chance to get out.” That’s only possible to happen if family reunion is the primary goal. You’ll see the answer as appropriate in mid-19th century America as it is now.
John C. Reilly has his role of a lifetime, a bit sclubby, a bit accomplished gunslinger, a bit neurotic, and a loving brother who sees the alcoholic Charlie through rough times, including an amputation as much figurative as realistic.
The cinematography using Spanish and Romanian landscapes would receive John Huston’s seal of approval. It has mine, too.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
