Unless you don't know beforehand, The Sisters Brothers seems a grammatical error, a film in need of an apostrophe, until you realise that 'Sisters' is in fact the unlikely surname of the brothers. It's also a little unusual that male and female should stand side by side in this Franco-American film by Jacques Audiard, who is noted for his testosterone-strewn films such as Le Prophète and in my view the very disappointing Deephan. His latest, Les Olympiades, apparently marks a change, but we shall see.
The DVD cover doesn't look like my kind of film at all, but then I really have to decide on my opinion of Audiard, so I have to give this movie a go. This is 1851 and the Sisters brothers (and here the capitalisation makes sense) are the hired killers Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix), employed to discover the formula permitting gold to be detected from the chemist Herman Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), and by any means possible, which of course includes torture.* Journeying on horseback (of course) from Oregon to California, the detective John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) is also not only on the trace of Warm but meets him, gets him to join him on the trek, and soon he is following Warm's cause rather than the killers': the creation of a philanstery or socialist community in Dallas, Texas.
When Eli and Charlie eventually find the men they go along with the prospecting, although the formula is so noxious that it kills Warm and Morris, and Eli has to have Charlie's arm amputated. But no longer in danger of repercussions from their boss the brothers go back to their mother in Oregon where they are welcomed and almost appear as long-lost pets. An odd and very unexpected ending.
*It needs noting that the brothers are very different from each other, and in spite of his violence, in a number of ways Eli comes over as somewhat effeminate.
No comments:
Post a Comment