Great cast, but too many shots in the dark
‘Have you noticed how long it’s been since anyone tried to kill us?” observes Eli Sisters (John C Reilly) as he and his younger brother Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) clop across the sun-baked Oregon brush.
As two bounty hunters in the employ of a vindictive small-town lawmaker known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer), dodging bullets is business as usual for the Sisters brothers, the two saddle-sore Sancho Panzas at the heart of Jacques Audiard’s picaresque western, adapted from a novel by Patrick dewitt.
The brothers’ latest target is Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist who has developed a compound that causes gold nuggets to glow green in water: an advance that could revolutionise prospecting.
Working on information from John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), an old accomplice who has wormed his way into Warm’s good graces, they give chase to San Francisco, although a series of misadventures en route make them question their loyalty to – well, just about everyone, except their ornery and odoriferous selves.
Audiard is the French director of Rust and Bone and A Prophet, and The Sisters Brothers is his first Englishlanguage feature. In places, it shows. There is a stiffness in the dialogue that means scenes often feel recited rather than performed: Gyllenhaal never sounds as if he has pinned down who his character is, while Phoenix, one of the great instinctual actors, feels uncharacteristically leashed.
Reilly does better: many of the film’s best passages involve the lunkish Eli encountering some new facet of civilised life for the first time, and not knowing how to process it. There is a good running toothbrush joke, while his childlike delight on encountering a flush lavatory plays like a Step Brothers deleted scene re-skinned. And Ahmed brings depth and texture, plus a winning idealistic twinkle, to what could have been a bland straightman role. As westerns go, this is Ahmed’s first rodeo, a smart bit of lateral casting in a film not short on them: see also British transgender actress Rebecca Root, grooving on Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar as an empire-building saloon proprietress.
Audiard’s expressionistic flourishes are in shorter supply than usual, though the shoot-outs have a dreamlike quality, with pistols blasting showers of sparks like miniature steam-train funnels. A dream sequence early on introduces the brothers’ drunken, violent father, whose “foul blood” runs in their veins: “That’s why we’re good at what we do,” Charlie says with a grunt of regret. The film comes pieced together by a talented ensemble. But like its opening farmhouse siege, it can feel like a lot of shots in the dark. RC To be released in UK cinemas this year