If you, like me, didn’t get a chance to see The Sisters Brothers in theaters last fall, or if you had no idea of the film’s existence/no interest in seeing it, the film is now available on Hulu and you should make every effort to right that wrong and enjoy a Western film with a big, broken heart, an off-beat sense of humor, and quietly powerful ruminations on the effect of life lived in violence.
The titular duo are Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix), guns-for-hire carving a bloody trail across the American West in 1851. Director Jacques Audiard quickly establishes that the Sisters are almost frighteningly effective: when they set themselves to killing, people get killed. That’s more than enough for Charlie, a man who leans hard into his worst nature, relishing those moments when he really gets to let his demons loose. And when he doesn’t have a job to occupy his mind, Charlie’s quick to find the nearest saloon to try and drown those demons down.
Eli’s the one who actually seems to wrestle with their actions, and this might be the best use of Reilly and that glorious hangdog face of his since…Jesus, this might be the best use of him ever. Reilly’s a producer on this, and he actually bought the rights to the book seven years before the movie finally got made. I haven’t read the book (by Patrick deWitt), but if it’s anything like the movie, it makes sense that Reilly would see something special for him to play. Eli’s every bit as efficient a killer as his brother, but he wears the cost around his neck like a whetstone. Judiciously doled out backstory gradually reveals that Eli continues in this line of work as a twisted kind of penance, and Reilly’s innate warmth juxtaposed with the bottomless weariness of his eyes says more than any monologue could about the toll this life has taken on his soul.
Most importantly, despite the disparity in their appearances, Reilly and Phoenix are credible as siblings, as people who know each other down to their bones, for better or worse. If you don’t buy the bond between them, the movie fails, full stop. Reilly and Phoenix make it work, and each man brings new and interesting shades out of the other.
But the Sisters are only half the movie. The other half concerns Hermann Kermit Wam (Riz Ahmed), a chemist that the Sisters have been hired to kill, and John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), a detective hired by the Sisters to hunt down Hermann. John does so, but his plans to stalk and waylay Hermann fall apart when the other man introduces himself and strikes up a friendship.
Hermann, it turns out, is being hunted because he claims to have developed a new compound which, when poured into water, reveals caches of gold, taking all the prospecting out of prospecting. With this formula, a man could simply snatch all the gold he wants out of the river. Hermann describes to John a new world, one in which he will use his gold to build a society where things like gold and other material wealth hold no power. This dream kindles something in John, waking up parts of him that went dormant long ago, and it’s not long after that that he’s thrown his lot in with Hermann.
Ahmed’s a mega-watt screen presence, so it’s nice to have a film role that finally seems to understand how appealing he is on camera. It was fun to see him in Rogue One, and I guess he seemed to be having a good time as More Evil Elon Musk in Venom, but here Audiard seems keyed in to just how likable Ahmed is, and he uses Hermann as an unfaltering North Star of decency in the violent West. You understand why men like John Morris, and others, find themselves drawn into Hermann’s orbit, anxious to believe that he really can work the kind of magic he claims.
Gyllenhaal’s built himself quite a reputation in the past few years with his choices in roles and collaborators, and I’ll be honest with you: I’ve started to worry that he’s in danger of favoring affectation over acting. There have been times where Gyllenhaal seems more interested in coming up with a funny accents, or doing some weird weight loss/gain stunt, then anything else. There’s a bit of that here (John Morris is English-ish? Maybe that’s from the book), but this is some of my favorite work from Gyllenhaal recently. He does a terrific job showing how Hermann’s innate decency thaws through Morris’ defenses until he has no choice but to put everything on the line for this other man.
The Sisters Brothers is funny often, frequently enough, that it’s not exactly wrong to call it a ‘comedy’, per se. Like many of the great Westerns, it’s content to take the scenic route, the characters shaggily winding their way towards inevitable confrontations. Audiard and cinematographer Benoît Debie (Gaspar Noe’s guy) capture a gorgeous, distinctive slice of the American landscape, and much of the film presumes (accurately) that it’s enough to have these great actors bouncing off one another against that backdrop, and that’s enough to make a movie.
But for all the glorious Western vistas, for all the humor, broad and sly and sometimes jet black, The Sisters Brothers is, like many a Western before it, concerned with death, and with the way the frontier contained within it infinite potential and infinite endings. The quirky humor and just-shy-of surreal bent may disguise it for a while, but this is a deeply sad film, uninterested in giving you the satisfying narrative blowouts you might expect/want from the set-up. Ultimately, The Sisters Brothers is a story about how life delivers you to where you belong, however cruel and painful that journey might be, however unfair it might seem.
It’s a terrific film, and more than ever I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to see it on the big screen and really savor those gorgeous compositions. But The Sisters Brothers is still a joy at home, using the Old West to tell a timeless story about the ways we sometimes can and sometimes can’t overcome the worst in the world and in ourselves.