'The Sisters Brothers' A Review

The Sisters Brothers is a western based on the 2011 novel of the same name. The film opens on the on the titular brothers, hired guns Eli(John C. Reilly) and Charlie(Joaquin Phoenix), during a brutal and striking midnight shoot out. After getting a new job from their boss the Comadore(Rutger Hauer) the two set off after idealistic chemist Hermann(Riz Ahmed) and their lead man Morris(Jake Gyllenhaal).

Reilly and Phoenix both put in balanced compelling performances, both brutal and emotional, conveying a sense of the time and evoking the genre but in a way that is more open and melancholy than we have a tendency to see. There is none of the typical stoicism, in its place we get a strikingly practical violence with a degree of introspection that feels remarkably fresh if cutting. The film bounces back between the titular brothers and the unlikely pair played by Ahmed and Gyllenhaal and they too have transmit a originality of character that the setting and circumstances of the story don't typically allow for. All four of the defacto leads put in relatively understated turns but all have a deep honesty and sincerity that make returning to the well-worn western new, exciting, and thought-provoking.

The cinematography is beautiful and bleak, the production design clearly focused on a surprising amount of authenticity or at least realism. The violence is brutal but practical. The setting unforgiving and oppressive but also kind of magical. There's a lot going on and all the elements work harmoniously to bring this unique western tale to life. Shot through with humor and a deep heartbreaking yearning the film delivers a singular experience in a bloated genre.

The novel offers the different pleasure of being inside Eli Sisters head but the film breaks up the focus, virtually equally, between the four leads and paints a strikingly compassionate nuanced portrait of the interior lives of these characters who we would typically only understand externally.

See It.