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 Benoît
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.
