Review

The Sisters Brothers

Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) and Eli (John C. Reilly) are mercenaries who have second and third thoughts in Jacques Audiard’s offbeat Western, The Sisters Brothers.
Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) and Eli (John C. Reilly) are mercenaries who have second and third thoughts in Jacques Audiard’s offbeat Western, The Sisters Brothers.

In cooking, few things are as versatile as the humble egg. Take it by itself, chop things into it to add taste and texture, bake it into a frittata or souffle, scatter it on soup, salads, or glaze a loaf of bread. When all else fails and your fridge is near barren, you can scramble an egg, throw in chopped avocado, cheese, and diced tomatoes and feel as if you're having a party, even if you're back late from work and want nothing more than a hot soak and an early bed.

As film genres go, Westerns play in similar fashion. (A hoarier writer than I would have played off of a western omelet reference just now, but look at how I protected you!) Versatile as a social commentary, action diatribe, black-and-white allegory, nuanced character examination, and knock-down shoot'em-up -- or even going full meta and creating a film about the genre itself, a la Unforgiven -- Westerns can be mixed in with any director's vision to create something that feels just new enough to be revelatory, using simple tropes that can be bent and twisted into new and exciting shapes, as a pack of pipe cleaners.

The Sisters Brothers

87 Cast: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rutger Hauer, Allison Tolman, Carol Kane, Rebecca Root

Director: Jacques Audiard

Rating: R for violence including disturbing images, language, and some sexual content

Running time: 2 hours, 1 minute

French director Jacques Audiard doesn't do anything revolutionary in his approach to the form, but working from an offbeat script he co-wrote with Thomas Bidegain, he throws enough feints and downbeats in to keep the film rumbling along at its own eccentric pace. Take the title alone, which is a mouthful until you realize the main protagonists actually have the last name "Sisters" -- try saying it out loud with emphasis on their last name as opposed to their familial connection

It also helps when you have a powerhouse cast -- Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed -- totally on board with this approach. The story involves the mercenary brothers Charlie and Eli (Phoenix and Reilly, respectively), working for a ruthless capitalist known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer), as they try to track down a gumshoe, Morris (Gyllenhaal), as he's secretly following a chemist, Hermann (Ahmed), who claims to have invented a compound that will reveal the gold nuggets in any section of a river.

Unbeknownst to the brothers, Morris and Hermann have actually partnered up, the private detective buying into the chemist's vision of a kind of socialized utopia where everything is shared and everyone is respected, such that when the parties finally do meet, they have an enormous amount to reconcile and very little time to do it before the Commodore's other henchmen track them down.

Eventually, the quartet all join together with not so wonderful results, but not before we've dealt with various bears, vertical teeth brushing, and a spider crawling into Eli's mouth as he sleeps.

Filled with odd, stylistic accents -- Eli also carries with him a scarf given by a woman which he thoroughly fetishizes; Gyllenhaal's Morris inexplicably speaks with a British inflection and keeps a highly literary journal for himself, and so on -- it's less of a conventional Western (there actually isn't a grand showdown, per se) than an exploration of the male consciousness, its avarice, brutality, aspiration and kindness on full display. Audiard's resulting egg dish might include a few wayward ingredients too many, but on the whole, it adequately fills your belly.

MovieStyle on 10/19/2018

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