The Sisters Brothers: A Superb Overlooked Film

The Sisters Brothers (2018)

Directed by Jacques Audiard

Annapurna Pictures, 121 minutes, R (language and brief peekaboo nudity)

★★★★

Once upon a time Westerns were standard fare in American theaters. During their heyday (late 1930s- early1960s) what one saw on the screen was both heroic and symbolic. These films were nearly always freighted with nationalistic assumptions: the triumph of good over evil, the inevitable victory of civilization over savagery, Westward expansion justified, and rugged individualism glorified. Heroes–cowboys, the cavalry, U.S. marshals, religious figures, honest loners–always defeated the “bad guys,” be they Indians, Mexicans, outlaws, card sharks, claim jumpers, or connivers. In 1971, Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller changed that. From that point on American Westerns became grittier, graphically sanguineous, and morally ambiguous.

Westerns never really died out, but their popularity waned once the white hats came off and lead characters morphed into amoral (and often slovenly) gunslingers, clever conmen, and hucksters. It also became problematic to treat those with red and brown skins as savages who deserved to be riddled with bullets. Post-McCabe critics often referred to a new genre, the “anti-Western.” The Sisters Brothers decidedly falls into that category. Perhaps that’s why it was seen by so few and recouped a mere third of its modest production costs, though I suspect it had more to do with being a joint French-American project rather than a Hollywood production. It showed in a small number of theaters, then disappeared. That’s too bad, as it’s a very good film.  

It stars John C. Reilly as Eli Sisters and Joaquin Phoenix as younger brother Charlie. Eli isn’t the brightest bulb in the socket, but he has a rudimentary moral center, unlike Charlie who is an angry, violent, suspicious drunkard ready to fight or shoot at the drop of ten-gallon hat. Eli pines for a school teacher who gave him a shawl he sentimentally sniffs and wears around his neck, but neither he nor Charlie have respectable jobs; they are hired guns for a rich man known only as The Commodore (Rutger Hauer).

It’s 1851, just two years into a gold rush that has spread from California to the Oregon Territory (OT), but the Commodore has more nefarious things in mind. He orders Eli and Charlie to go to Jacksonville, OT to rendezvous with another minion, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), who will have detained a man named Herman Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed). They are to obtain from Warm any way necessary–read torture–a formula he has developed, then kill him. Nothing goes according to plan. Morris is outwitted, but he’s the wrong man for the job in the first place, a poetic brooder with little taste for violence. Warm convinces him that he has a plan that will allow both of them to make money and fund a utopian community near Dallas devoted to harmony, internationalism, and communal living. The Sisters Brothers must now track both Morris and Warm. Their journey will take them back across the border into California to Mayfield, a pop-up town like so many during the gold rush except it’s controlled by an imposing matriarch and madam (Rebecca Root) for whom the town is named.

The Sisters brothers are like superheroes gone bad and shootout scenes play out that way. They will eventually discover that Warm has filed a claim in Oregon, and track down their quarry, but circumstances are altered when they learn that his formula causes gold in creek beds to glow. Eli is even willing to listen to Warm’s utopian spiel, though Charlie is having none of it. In movies, gold is Chekov’s gun–a substance that corrupts and destroys. I will say only that nothing goes according to plan for anyone.

Phalanstere

If you’re thinking the utopian stuff sounds far-fetched, let me assure you that it was a thing. Director Audiard, who also wrote the screenplay, references La Réunion, a short-lived community begun by Frenchman Victor Prosper Considerant and dedicated to the principles of another countryman, Charles Fourier. There were dozens of Fourierist communities in the antebellum United States that were built upon democratic socialist principles. You will hear film references to a Phalanstère, sometimes called a phalanx, which is essentially a largescale single-building complex in which members lived, worked, and indulged in artistic pursuits.*

O’Reilly is terrific as soft-spoken man who is conflicted by his violet lifestyle, but feels a fraternal need to protect his younger brother and focuses like a laser when the shooting begins. He’s not usually a lead actor, but he outshines his co-star, though Phoenix does a fine job of portraying a soul damaged in childhood who grows into a human volcano that periodically erupts. Gyllenhaal and Ahmed are also superb, the former akin to a philosopher carrying a gun and, like Ahmed, a decent man out of place in a Wild West corrupted by greed and unbridled individualism. Toward the end, you also see Carol Kane in a cameo, an actress I’ve not seen in years.

Audiard’s West is a place where dreams are crushed–no eucatastrophic endings for this film. He won a few awards at film festivals, as did Alexandre Desplat for his musical direction. The Sisters Brothers is a very good film and deserves a wider viewership.

Rob Weir

** La Réunion could have used an infusion of gold. It only lasted about 18 months before bankruptcy and bad weather put an end to an experiment in which French, Swiss, Belgians, and Americans attempted a grand scale communal life experiment.

-->