Stylish and worth saddling up for
The Sisters Brothers 15 cert, 122 min
★★★★★
Dir Jacques Audiard Starring Joaquin Phoenix, John C Reilly, Riz Ahmed, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Root, Rutger Hauer
‘Have you noticed how long it’s been since anyone tried to kill us?” Eli Sisters (John C Reilly) observes as he and his younger brother Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) clop across the Oregon brush. As bounty hunters in the employ of a vindictive small-town lawmaker known as the Commodore (a quick, sly cameo for Rutger Hauer), dodging bullets is business as usual for the Sisters brothers, the two saddlesore Sancho Panzas at the heart of Jacques Audiard’s picaresque western, adapted by its director and his regular co-writer Thomas Bidegain from the book by Patrick dewitt.
The brothers’ own target, at least when we join them, is a chemist called Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who is rumoured to have made some breakthrough that could upend the whole California gold rush. With intel from a detective called John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), the brothers give chase on the trail to San Francisco, although a string of by turns grotesque and ludicrous misadventures en route make them question their loyalty to –
well, just about everyone, other than their ornery and odoriferous selves.
Audiard is the French director of Rust and Bone, and The Sisters Brothers is his first English-language feature. But it is Reilly’s passion project: the Stan & Ollie actor bought the rights to the novel as soon as it was published in 2011, presumably with a view to playing the ungainly but tender-hearted Eli, the narrator in dewitt’s novel. It proves an excellent fit. Eli’s oafishness allows for some fine physical comedy, but his ever-prickling conscience makes him a more finely shaded figure than his angrier, drunker, younger sibling.
Charismatic, brutal and stylish, The Sisters Brothers is a film that’s easy to say nice things about, as many critics have been doing since its premiere at Venice last September, where Audiard nabbed the festival’s best director prize. Yet even after a second viewing earlier this week, its meandering this-and-that structure still didn’t click with me.
The regular shifts in focus between the brothers and Warm and Morris make it hard to settle into any one character’s company – when both parties are finally united you can feel the entire film relax around them. And there is little sense that their wild experiences are amounting to much, especially in the wake of the film’s serene coda. Closing on a hopeful note isn’t the done thing in westerns these days, which from The Hateful Eight to The Ballad of Buster Scruggs are going through a particularly dour revisionist streak. That makes The Sisters Brothers a curio – and well worth watching, even if it amuses more than it moves.