Jacques Audiard (2018)
In 1969, two chalk-and-cheese Westerns helped redefine the genre, for mainstream audiences and for plenty of critics. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was widely seen as unprecedented in terms of cinematic technique and graphic violence: Michael Sragow has called it ‘the Götterdämmerung of Westerns‘. The eponymous heroes of George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, like Peckinpah’s characters, were violent outlaws yet meant to be irresistible too. The William Goldman dialogue they delivered was smart, arch, verging on anachronistic. The arrival of Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers on virtually the fiftieth anniversary of these two films might seem timely. It has something in common – eyecatching mayhem on the one hand, knowing smart talk on the other – with each progenitor. The title characters, to judge from their names and personalities, might be creations of another fraternal duo – the Coen brothers – but the source material is actually a Booker Prize-shortlisted novel of the same name by the Canadian Patrick De Witt, first published in 2011 and described by Wikipedia as a ‘darkly comic’ picaresque. (The screenplay is by Audiard and his regular collaborator Thomas Bidegain (A Prophet, Rust and Bone, Dheepan).)
In Oregon, in 1851, hired guns Eli Sisters (John C Reilly) and his younger brother Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) are engaged by a businessman known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer) to kill one Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed) – another Coen-ish name. Warm allegedly robbed the Commodore, for whom John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), a private detective, is also working. His job is to track down Warm and deliver him to the Sisters (as I’ll call them). Morris finds Warm on a wagon train, en route to the California Gold Rush, and pretends to befriend him. In Jacksonville, where his handover to the Sisters is to take place, Warm realises what Morris is up to. He tells the detective of his plan to find gold in riverbeds, using a chemical formula he’s invented that makes gold ore glow underwater: the Commodore, Warm says, means to get hold of the formula before having him killed. High-minded Morris accepts Warm’s story and abandons his assignment for the Commodore, leaving Jacksonville for San Francisco with Warm. The latter too is high-minded: he plans, once he’s struck gold, to create a utopian, greed-free society, in Texas. The Sisters also make it to San Francisco eventually, after a series of murders, misfortunes and fallings out between them. Their progress is further impeded by Charlie’s regular binge-drinking, which leaves him too hung over to ride a horse.
To cut what’s already an overlong plot summary short: the Sisters eventually join forces with Warm and Morris to kill common enemies and find gold. Warm’s brainchild works but the golden glow is only transient and the chemical formula highly caustic. All four men except Eli are badly burned. Warm dies; Morris shoots himself to end his suffering; Eli takes Charlie to the nearest town, where a doctor amputates his damaged arm. In a gunfight with more of the Commodore’s men, Eli prevails. He and Charlie head back to their starting point to kill the man who employed them. They encounter and eliminate a succession of other shootists on the way but there’s no sign of gunmen by the time they approach Oregon City, where they discover the Commodore is already dead. The Sisters return home to their mother (Carol Kane, whom I didn’t recognise). She’s both surprised and suspicious to see her boys but eventually lets them in.
The casting of Joaquin Phoenix as loco Charlie and John C Reilly as workmanlike Eli isn’t imaginative but Reilly gives another fine performance: 2018 was a big year for him, with Stan & Ollie too (not to mention Ralph Breaks the Internet). Reilly has a particular gift for expressing uneasy conscience – most remarkably here when Eli, who’d like to retire and run a store, explains he went into gunfighting to keep a responsible eye on his hoodlum kid brother and admits feeling guilty that it was Charlie, rather than he, who, when they were still boys, killed their abusive father. An Oedipal motif is perhaps the most striking feature of the narrative. The Sisters go back to mother once another dominant older man, in the shape of the Commodore, is dead. Even when they see him in his coffin, Eli punches the corpse ‘just to make sure’.
The Sisters Brothers begins with explosively loud gunfire in darkness. When dawn broke next day (or any subsequent day in the story), it didn’t bring enough light for this viewer. Indoors, this results from Audiard and his cinematographer Benoît Debie opting for ‘natural light’. The outdoor images are stranger: landscapes often have a glow that somehow doesn’t make its way up from the ground to the characters’ faces. The effect may be meant to connect to that of Warm’s formula or the result of my weak eyes but it made a difference: when you start at an emotional remove from a film (as I usually do with Westerns), not being able to see clearly reinforces a sense of disengagement. I could hear things better but the pleased-with-itself pithy dialogue didn’t help with the disengagement either. For example:
Charlie: You do realise that our father was stark raving mad and we got his foul blood in our veins? That was his gift to us. That blood is why we’re good at what we do.
Eli: Our father drank, Charlie.
Charlie: Touché.
In the hotel/brothel run by baleful madam Mayfield (Rebecca Root), Eli has a post-modern conversation with a nice, helpful prostitute (Allison Tolman), in which he repeatedly tells her exactly what to do and say:
Eli: We can act like you’re giving me this shawl and you consider it a valuable object. Understand? With a kind word.
Prostitute: Here-
Eli: No. With a kind …
Prostitute: What? – I don’t know what …
Eli: Simple words. “I thought it might get cold.” I’m leaving – and you’re giving me this.
Prostitute: I…
Eli: “I thought it might get cold.”
Prostitute: I thought it might get cold. …
Eli: “Can I steal a kiss from you?”
Prostitute: Yes.
Eli: No, you say that …
If you enjoy this kind of stuff, you’ll likely enjoy too the smug bad joke of Texas as the place for an idealistic democracy to flourish. I didn’t, though I quite liked the Sisters’ amazed experience of mod cons – a flush toilet, toothbrushes – in places they stayed in. The story and imagery reference some accepted peaks of achievement in Western film-making. Even an ignoramus like me can relate the ill-fated gold-prospecting to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and see, in the final homecoming, the ‘doorway shot’ from The Searchers. What this is supposed to add up to, though, I haven’t a clue. It doesn’t make for an involving two hours in the cinema.
Sixty years on from the birth of the Nouvelle Vague, The Sisters Brothers’s reception across the Channel suggests a continuing enthusiasm for conscious attempts by French directors to interpret classic Hollywood genres – or French directors as successfully versatile as Jacques Audiard anyway. This film has won four Césars and three Lumières awards, including Best Director in both. Transatlantic accolades, by contrast, are thin on the ground and the film was nowhere to be seen in this year’s Oscar nominations. There’s also a signal dissimilarity in commercial performance between The Sisters Brothers and the seminal Westerns of half a century ago. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a popular smash. The Wild Bunch did very respectable box-office. Audiard’s picture cost around $38m to make: six months after opening, it’s recouped less than $11m worldwide.
7 April 2019