Review of The Sisters Brothers (2018) by Hnestlyonthesly — 12 Oct 2019

He Sisters Brothers accomplishes almost everything it sets out to do: a it’s a fresh adaptation set in the Old West without any of the restrictions of its genre’s tropes. The fecundity of violence, its hydra-headed nature is on full display, and the film balances dark humor and distances violence through a lens of objectivity. Everything below is for your perusal after you’ve experienced the movie.

Murdering the father and murdering Mayfield and not murdering the chemist leads to the multiplicative violence. Double story line.

What Wife remembers most from the book is that it is narrated from Eli’s perspective, so you have a lot more verbalization of his feelings which makes him the center of sympathy. The film flattens out that subjective lens, which is not to say it’s a bad thing. The inscrutability of the Sisters Brothers’ motives and their future plans is a source of high tension in the film, and the growing divergence between Eli and Charlie naturally splits the audience. Wife mentions by way of the film’s divergence from the scrip that in the novel Eli’s Romance pops up in the middle of Eli’s adventure, rather than prior to the action in the film (“Might have been the prostitute with the scarf”). The way in which John C. Reily plays the scene with the woman in the brothel is masterful tragicomic scene. Wife suggests that one of the central tragic points of the story is Charlie’s responsibility for the death of the two companions. His arrogance and shortsightedness leads to an unfixable mistake. Charlie’s greed is self-destructive, even as the Sisters Brothers prove to be less affected by the formula than their counterparts. She mentioned something about the way in which memory and regret in the film are unidirectional (my coinage) and no one mourns the loss of the formula. I think that idea about the reluctance to dwell on the past, the momentum that drives the brothers forward but also the guilt that plagues them and draws them together are all part of the depiction of violence as well.

One thing that stands out in this movie is the choreography of fighting, such that the drama of the action is not about whether the brothers will survive, but rather “how they will deal with the emotional consequences” (as Wife puts it) of their participation in that violence. The scene where Eli must dispatch the very same people that Charlie has just put forward as possible new partners in the event of Eli’s departure from the headhunting business is deliciously ironic. The skill with which the brothers fight actually takes some of the thrill out of the action sequences, but I think it’s done intentionally. The film is interested in their coping with decisions as it is with the effectiveness of their violent deeds.

The false bottom ending turns upside down the action genre structure. Revenge film tropes are obliterated. Having just rewatched You Were Never Really Here again last night three weeks ago, they have remarkably similar structures. The triumphant, Odyssean return to Ithaka is deflated and challenged, and in lieu of a blaze of glory, bloody reckoning (itself a morally fraught act), the protagonists are forced to grapple with their alternatives.

Check The Sisters Brothers out. It’s one of my favorite of the year.

An update from March of 2019: John C Reilly won a Razzie for his work this past year and he doesn’t deserve it.