This movie may be under your radar -- it hasn't been publicized with the same intensity of A Star is Born, or First Man, or now The Widows -- but it's worth seeing.
If you don't know this, Sisters Brothers is a Western, starring Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, and Jake Gyllenhall.
Phoenix and Reilly are the titular brothers, named Sisters, Charlie and Eli, who, in good Western tradition, are hired killers for a little-seen mobster called the Commodore. One suspects the name is supposed to be a joke, and Charlie tries to make something of it in the film, but it falls dead in the movie version (it's based on a book).
In the opening scene, I suppose in what we are to think is directorial genius, there is a shootout at night, where are you can see is the flare of gunfire. The brothers come out on the good end (shocked face!) and then go off to the Commodore for their next assignment.
This entails a prolonged road trip to find John Morris (Gyllenhall), who is tracking a guy named Warm (played by Riz Ahmed). A Western with a road trip. Shock.
Morris, Warm, and Eli all are rather contemplative cowboys (tho none seems particularly aware of cows), with Morris's thinking signaled by his keeping a diary, which Gyllenhall voices over at times. And his notes to the brothers to let them know where he has followed Warm are overwritten -- "precipitate" being one word that Charlie scoffs at (it's not clear he can read as Reilly's character reads and keeps all the notes).
Charlie is a drunk and a mean one. In one scene, he stops puking long enough to help Eli kill 5 guys sent after them. Like many Westerns, especially contemporary ones, the body count here is high.
In the end the foursome ends up together in the midst of the California gold rush and it turns out Warm has an idea of how to identify gold easier. You know if you've ever seen a movie set in the California gold fields that this won't end with them all living rich lives in San Francisco with their golden treasure and the whole thing goes sour quickly -- I won't give more away.
This movie smells like Oscar bait, with Reilly, Phoenix (a perennial Oscar contender), and even Gyllenhall given parts that beg for consideration (it's not quite last year's The Paper where it was like Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep paused in the middle and said "you all need to consider this come Oscar time", but it has that smell to it).
Is it worth seeing? Yes, especially if you like the genre. It's not Phoenix's best performance by any stretch, but Reilly is very good as the downtrodden, sentimental older brother, and Gyllenhall and Ahmed are passable. The unusualness of the story -- the contemplation of the characters, the interchanges between the brothers, and the unusual plot twists (it ends in a place you wouldn't predict if you've ever seen a Western) -- makes it worth seeing and thought-provoking, beyond the death and destruction the brothers leave in their wake.
Next week: no real killer openings (Hunter Killer?)...
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