BROTHERS IN ARMS
Phoenix, Reilly play violent hired guns in Wild West
Directed by two-time BAFTA Award winner Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet”) and based on an acclaimed historical novel by Canadian author Patrick deWitt, “The Sisters Brothers” is a “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” for these crazy, desperate times.
In the annals of onscreen Wild West brothers, the Sisters brothers may, outside of the funny name, remind genre fans of the Dalton and the James brothers. The Sisters brothers comprise the hotheaded, trigger-fingered Charlie Sisters (Academy Award nominee Joaquin Phoenix) and his older, more cautious and no less deadly brother Eli Sisters (John C. Reilly), a pair of hired guns in a pre-Civil War United States.
Set during the California Gold Rush in Oregon and California in 1851, the film tells the story of the brothers' quest, ordered by their powerful boss, the Commodore (Rutger Hauer, who has no lines), to track down and murder a chemist and prospector named Hermann Kermit
Warm (Emmy
Award winner Riz Ahmed). Warm has discovered a dangerous chemical process for finding gold in rivers and streams. Accompanying Warm is the adventuresome gunslingerdetective John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal, speaking with some indeterminate accent), who was also hired to track Warm down, but joins up with him instead. Thus, the film gives us two sets of brothers, one multicultural and improvised, the other blood relations, on a mortal collision course.
The film, which mixes drama, dark comedy and extreme violence, is an episodic picaresque tale, or as Eli puts it, “One thing leads to another.” In one scene, Eli role-plays with a prostitute. In another a spider crawls into his mouth while he sleeps, and he wakes the next day his face grotesquely swollen. Eli's horse is mauled by a bear. “The Sisters Brothers” is about among other things, how resilient and longsuffering 19th century Americans
migrating West were and how some sought to found utopian communities in the West.
The Sisters brothers bicker and fight as they cross deserts and climb mountains with stops in newly sprouted towns along the way. While Eli tries to puzzle out how to brush his teeth, Charlie gets drunk and shoots up a saloon. But when the time comes to kill, these brothers are prepared and relentless.
The distinctive sound of the gunshots in the film may remind some viewers of the gory glory days of spaghetti Westerns. Adapted by Audiard and frequent collaborator Thomas Bidegain (“A Prophet,” “Rust and Bone”), “The Sisters Brothers” is Audiard's first English-language film, and it is a glorious debut, a throwback to the American revisionist Westerns of the 1970s. Director of photography Benoit Debie captures the Edenic beauty of the Western landscape with his lens. Music and sound design by Alexandre Desplat (“Isle of Dogs”) recall the quirky expressionism of Ennio Morricone minus the whistling. Phoenix and Reilly have a marvelous fraternal chemistry. Take a ride with the Sisters.