The Sisters Brothers

Certainly the better of the two Westerns I've seen today, but I'm also not really feeling the love with Sisters Brothers like everybody else seems to be.

Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole.

A plodding and overlong tale of violence and redemption that doesn't seem to know quite what it's trying to say

You are afraid of hell. But that's all religion is, really. Fear of a place we'd rather not be, and where there's no such a thing as suicide to steal us away.

• Patrick deWitt; The Sisters Brothers (2011)

The Sisters Brothers is a film set in the American Old West, based on a book by a Canadian, made by a mostly French crew, shot primarily in Spain and Romania, featuring a Brit as an American, an American as a Brit, and a British trans comedian as a ruthless American businesswoman. And I don't bring this up out of mere frivolousness; rather, a certain element of schizophrenia is built into the film's very DNA. On the surface it's a Revisionist Western with a gritty Spaghetti aesthetic focusing very much on a group of anti-heroes, but it's also a story of two brothers getting on one another's nerves, a tale of avarice and the destructive potential of progressive thinking, a chase movie, a dark comedy, a tragic fable, an examination of the days when the Old West was giving way to an ever-encroaching modernity, a look at how the sins of the father are oft repeated by the children, a study of competing types of masculinity, and even a political thesis, postulating that there was a time in American history when certain people genuinely believed they could build a harmonious society based on direct democracy and the kind of socialist attitude to capitalism that would make even Bernie Sanders blush.

The English language debut of French director Jacques Audiard, who adapted the script with his regular writing partner Thomas Bidegain from Patrick deWitt's 2011 novel of the same name, the film posits that even those who seem irredeemable may one day find a path to redemption. Very much of a piece with Audiard's more celebrated humanist work such as De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté (2005), Un prophète (2009), and Dheepan (2015), _The Si...

I was looking forward to this. It has two of my favorite actors in it. Unfortunately, I had to give up on watching it. It's impossible to see what's going on. There are some shadows moving about, sometimes covering each other. A dot lights up occasionally on my 55-inch OLED. I can see subtitles, hear the sound. This is apparently one of those "someone invented HDR, that means we should put a cloth over the lens" kind of movies. Such a shame.

It might be that the clever title and the fact that this is backed by an whole host of European film funds is all that makes this rather sterile Western memorable. It's all about the enigmatic "Commodore" (Rutger Hauer) employing the eponymous brothers - "Eli" (John C. Reilly) and "Charlie" (Joaquin Phoenix) to track down the mild-mannered prospector "Kermit Warm" (a rather mis-cast Riz Ahmed) whom he accuses of theft. This isn't the first time he has engaged them, and both are suspicious of the activities of their boss - but he pays well and they quite enjoy their jobs. Whatever the man stole is important enough for "Morris" (Jake Gyllenhaal) to also be employed and it's him who finds their target travelling to San Francisco. He makes all the overtures of friendship, but we quickly learn that he is in cahoots with the "Sisters". Why, though? What did he steal to cause so much effort to retrieve him. Well as that question is answered, might we see a re-alignment of the attitudes of his pursuers? It's billed as a dark comedy, but I can't say I found much humorous in it. Nor did I find much of a rapport between Reilly and an understated Phoenix as the contrived story seemed designed to meander rather than impact. There are a few decent shoot 'em up scenes and it does show just how tough the whole pioneering and prospecting wild west was, but this story seems to be trying to be a little more thoughtful rather than action-packed and for me it fell between two stools. Maybe it would have been better had it lost twenty minutes to tighten it up a bit and lose some of the seemingness endless dialogue that added little to the narrative. Disappointing.