Wednesday, July 31, 2019

The Sisters Brothers



The Sisters Brothers (2018)
Dir. Jacques Audiard
Written by Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, based on the novel by Patrick deWitt
Starring John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed

All Westerns are fairy tales, and they all say more about us than they ever did about some brief historical period in the Western United States which was mostly defined, as far as the culture is concerned, by the East-coast pulp writers who spun a unique sort of fantasy out of scraps of overheard, imagined and embellished stories that drifted back to them over the years, secondhand. The first Westerns rode by on a quintessentially American fairy tale of rugged masculinity, of potent individualism made flesh in the larger-than-life heroes of that era: John Wayne forcefully ensuring neither Indian nor bandit nor bureaucrat would tell him what to do, Shane confidently riding into town to supplant father and lover alike. Eventually, this took on a mournful tone, casting that fetishization of manly power as a nostalgic reminder of a bygone era; consequently, all subsequent Westerns were not only fairy tales, but requiems. Eventually, when the hollowness of this particular fairy tale began to show through the increasingly threadbare seams, the revisionist Western was born, a new sort of fairy tale for an era where the shortcomings of the old one had become too obvious to ignore; now, Westerns were about demystifying the icons of our fathers' generations, about telling ourselves that the "true story" is a lot more complicated and morally ambiguous than the white hats and black hats of yesteryear would have it seem.

THE SISTERS BROTHERS, along with SLOW WEST and a few other Westerns from the last decade (THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSES JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD, THE REVENANT) have sometimes been called "revisionist Westerns," but I'd argue they're actually something else entirely, maybe even something more honest. While the Revisionist movement tried to ground the familiar genre tropes in gritty, self-consciously unromanticized realism, these movies more openly embrace the mythic nature of the Western, returning to the deeper truth of fairy tales, which have much more to tell us about reality than the gritty reimaginings of old cowboy pulp tales from the late 19th century ever could. Of all of them, though, the SISTERS BROTHERS tells the most complex fairy tale; if the revisionist Westerns tried to sully the clear lines between the black hats and white hats, director Jacques Audiard (A PROPHET, which remains his masterpiece) reimagines the conflict completely, into something whimsical, tragic, and baffling; there is some kind of moral here about the loss of Eden, but it's a slippery, nebulous thing. Characters who seem set up to give us clear moral parables shift subtly as the situation changes, find themselves stranded in unknown territory, and wander onward blindly, eventually emerging blinking into the light, unsure how they came here. 



The setup seems simple enough; we have two titular Brothers (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly, looking only vaguely like the same species, let alone brothers) veteran bounty hunters a little down on their luck, sent by a nameless Commodore (Rutger Hauer, RIP, in a wordless cameo) to work with a spy (Jake Gyllenhaal) to execute a penniless (but erudite!) prospector, one Herman Warm (Riz Ahmed) for crimes that are at first not specified. That the movie intends to undermine the seeming simplicity of its premise seems obvious; exactly how it does so is what makes the movie so unique and interesting. 

At first, it seems like a fairly straightforward post-modern gag: Phoenix, the dominant brother, is the archetypal Western hero in the John Wayne mode, a man of masculine power and violence, benevolent but flawed, principled but fiercely independent, a protector, a hero and an outcast. I think it is not overstating the case to say this is the rough shape all true action heroes in American fiction, and Audiard wants us to be acutely aware of it. A character like this is the expectation in a Western, but here he's comically joined by his partner (and older brother) John C. Reilly, nobody's idea of an action hero, an invading force of soft modernity, contrasting our placid modern values against the righteous Old Testament virtues of the genre cinema of the past. Where Phoenix is blunt and confident, Reilly is neurotic and tentative; where Phoenix’s flaws are tragic and dignified, Reilly whines and suffers comic indignities. The joke, it seems, is that Reilly is something of a man out of time, skeptical and uncertain about the rough and tumble world around him that everyone else seems to easily take for granted.

But things are not quite what they appear; after a while, it seems like the movie is making the opposite point, a point I've maybe always wanted to see in a movie: Phoenix’s macho code of violence is basically psychopathy, and Reilly's humble dorkiness is actually a sanity which only looks goofy because men like Phoenix have ruined the world. And to compliment that interpretation, we have the parallel story (which for much of the first half threatens to become the main story) of Gyllenhaal and Ahmed, who stumble together onto a genuinely different way of being, something based in earnest love instead of violence (maybe it’s just seeing Gyllenhaal in a cowboy hat again, but I took their relationship to be more than simple business partners, though the movie is not explicit on this point). The movie, then, seems headed towards a gentle bit of optimism about the possibility of changing ourselves into kinder, more humane beings. But just when it seems like this is coalescing into a clear moral, things shift again, and everything turns topsy-turvy, and we're left with nothing to do but slink away scratching our heads, wondering what it all meant. 



It would be, I suppose, easy enough to accuse a movie which so carefully avoids the expected moral lesson of a kind of lazy nihilism, the sort of offhanded cynicism with which French movies (it’s actually a French-American co-production) so often get stereotyped. But I don’t think that’s the case here; there’s a warm affection for the characters which is evident from the start. I think Audiard would genuinely love to give them all a happy ending, but he also knows that life is random –not even cruel, per se, although that’s certainly always a possibility— and the story you think you’re living doesn’t always arrive at a clean catharsis, the lesson you think you’re supposed to learn isn’t always the one you come away with. Everything becomes complicated and messy and confusing, and who knows what it all means? We tend to think of the past as a simpler time, compared with the endlessly complex, unpredictable modern world, where all our actions ripple out and return in ways we can never wholly imagine or prepare for. THE SISTERS BROTHERS is a good reminder that nothing about the human condition has ever been simple (even their name is contradictory!).

Of course, the (intentional) anti-climax and chatty, journey-not-the-destination structure might be off-putting to some. I suppose it’s probably the result of the film’s novelistic origins; the written word can be a more direct medium to communicate an author’s intentions than cinema has historically been, meaning that a film like this, which doesn’t want to tip explicitly into the avant-garde, is probably more essentially narrative-driven than its written progenitor. It presents itself as being a normal narrative, and then deliberately undermines the expectations it sets up, and I could certainly understand why that would feel disappointing, or even like cheap shot. But at least in this case, with a glass or two of red wine in me, I was able to get on-board with the movie’s uniquely off-beat, shaggy vibe, and it really resonated with me. There’s a kind of fatalistic melancholy here which feels all the more acute for the movie’s generally unflinching, unsentimental tone and refusal to bend itself into the expected lessons. The world can be a hard, confusing place which offers no easy answers and resists our most carefully crafted plans to make sense of it. And yet, there’s no alternative but to just live in it anyway, to keep going forward. It’s impossible, and sometimes horrible, but also sometimes kind of beautiful, if you stop to pay attention to it.

On hand to remind us about that beauty part is cinematographer BenoĆ®t Debie (LOST RIVER). You don't need a talent like Debie's to make the West look gorgeous, but it sure doesn't hurt, especially in the nifty way he frames nighttime gunfights as eruptions of orange fire in the deep blue-black of the landscape (some people have complained about the garish digital color grading here, but I sort of like how it eschews the usual Western palette of drab earth tones by turning the landscape into a candy-colored wonderland). The incisive, almost minimalistic score (by Alexandre Desplat, Wes Anderson’s go-to guy, but obviously most notable as the composer for VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS) also packs a big punch, though in the movie’s typically unpushy way, and does much to lightly suggest its weary, vaguely mythic tone.



The craft on display here is certainly indisputable, but it doesn’t seem like most reviewers connected to the movie the same way I did. It’s certainly understandable; what’s an audience to do with a film that isn’t really a drama, or a comedy, or an art film, or an action film, but has little streaks of all four shaped into a narrative which just rises and then withers on the vine? To a lot of people, it seems to have added up to a whole lot of nothing. To me, though, it seems deeply, even painfully, evocative of my particular time and place in history. It’s not a wholly nihilistic film; in fact, it’s a film which very much wants the best for and sees the best in people. But it’s also a film acutely aware that this is a world full of good ideas that die random, ignoble deaths, good people trapped in a cycle of doing bad things, good intentions which are not the right intentions for this particular moment. Evil doesn’t usually prevail, but then neither does good; only chaos and entropy can be counted on consistently in a universe that cares neither for our souls nor our values. Obviously one need look no further than the front page of a newspaper to learn this lesson, but there’s something about the way that Audiard blends that sense of mournful hopelessness with the classic American iconography of a Western that feels poetic and poignant, both deeply admiring of American idealism and moral rectitude and simultaneously clear-eyed and despairing of how naive and brittle it all is.

We'd like to have a journey with a clear purpose, a moral arc that lets us tell a story to give it all some meaning. We’d all like to live by a code, to be the hero, to be upright and uncompromising, self-sacrificing, independent, ultra-competent, powerful but benevolent.  We’d all love to be John Wayne, we’d all love to be Shane. But of course, they never existed, they were just a fairy tale, a fantasy we told ourselves about what we wanted to be and maybe ended up believing a little too much. There's a sweetness to that aspirational fantasy, but also something stifling, even dangerous in its ignorance. We're not John Wayne; even John Wayne wasn't John Wayne, he was just some prima donna actor, another American huckster peddling a comforting lie. We are not mythic heroes; Instead, we’re all John C. Reilly; unfulfilled, undignified, uncertain, groping blindly towards doing, if not the right thing, at least hopefully not the wrong thing either, and maybe --maybe-- a few times in a lifetime, seeing some kind of profound truth, some kind of divine path, only to watch it slip out of our grasp before we can put ourselves upon it. And when that happens, what are we left with but to trudge home, older and more broken but barely any wiser than before, towards that dim hope of simple human comfort. And maybe just a little bit of beauty along the way.