‘The Sisters Brothers’ or — Trouble Panning Out?
Warning — Contains excessive pontificating about a genre I have zero expertise in.
‘The Sisters Brothers’ (2018) tells the story of two brothers with the last name of Sisters. They are gunmen working for The Commodore, a powerful businessman, who has sent them to track, torture and retrieve a certain formula that could revolutionise gold-prospecting from a chemist called Hermann Warm. However, Warm has been helped to escape by John Morris, a private detective, who was also originally sent out to capture Warm by The Commodore but who now sees Warm as a good, innocent man trying to change a tough, brutal time.
It’s not long (although it sure feels like it) until the brothers are on the heels of Morris and Warm. Will the brothers get their man in this landscape where nothing noble can survive or will constant misfortune and their penchant for nihilism and violence prevent them from doing so?
‘The Sisters Brothers’ (2018) is a deeply frustrating picture with a bizarre tonal balance that’s as uncertain as a drunken cowboy straddling his horse. The film was billed as a comedy/drama and there’s comedy here but it is completely weighed down by an aspiration for sweep and scope of the authentic Old West that it sometimes feels like ‘Carry on Cowboy’ directed by Michael Cimino, and its as laborious as that sounds. And these aren’t so much tonal lurches as tonal sways as ‘The Sisters Brothers’ takes its sweet time over every single thing that happens making the entire film like watching a smoker drag out their very last cigarette.
Also, I don’t know if it’s just me (and it more than likely is) but I’m getting a little tired of all this natural-light cinematography and period authenticity substituting for verve, excitement, energy, dramatic-tension or any of the other reasons I love watching a movie. Yes, that shot is quite impressive and the lack of artificial lighting (although never believe what you see in the movies is anything other than artificial) must have made it hard to pull off but, to me, it’s dark and flat and dull and the entire film is an artifice anyway and riddled with, albeit discreet, CGI that I was constantly taken out of the picture by questioning all this slavish posturing. Or maybe binge watching all those Sartana movies recently has ruined my palette for subtlety, a more “mature pace” or Westerns that lack exploding robots.
Plus, I’d heard ‘The Sisters Brother’s described as a “Revisionist Western” but this also got on my man-boobs as it seems that every Western made recently gets labelled “revisionist” (and which I’m starting to think might now be a term for ‘boring’). But I can’t think of a genre that has nearly always been revisionist to a certain extent and in a state of near constant reinvention, and this was going on way before ‘The Wild Bunch’ (1969) or Altman came along. And if you want a gunfighter breaking the fourth wall and shooting you straight between the eyes then you can go back to 1903. That’s still a pretty modern image to me and one not weighed down by pretentious sentimentality.
Bitching aside, there are some good aspects to the film, including the acting which is strong all round. There are a few nice moments and sequences although nothing really seems to have an impact that lasts or, unlike a poisonous spider, get under the skin.
If you’re into unflinching violence (because that’s authentic and how it was back then) shot in an obsessively naturalistic way (because that’s authentic and how it was back then) and concerning the tough male in a tough landscape (because etc… ) ‘The Sisters Brothers’ might be for you, although if I want a comedy-western I’ll stick to ‘Evil Roy Slade’ (1972) or ‘Cactus Jack’ (1979) thank you very much.
One last thing, though — are ALL Westerns about the passing of an age nowadays? Of the Old giving way to the New? The horse replaced by the train? Of a breed of men who have been outpaced and outridden by the Times? Is that all we’re getting now thematically since Peckinpah blew everyone away or Ethan Edwards walked off into the landscape alone? Personally the next Western I want to see is an unapologetic one and one that celebrates its genre. Maybe the life story of Yosemite Sam; the hootinest, tootinest, shootinest bobtail wildcat in the West and who delights in his own persona as much as firing off his six-shooters. Why? Because he fucking can, consarnit.
