For a while there, it looked like Megan Ellison, the producing savior of Great Hollywood Movies™, was finding a new career making great films with great talent and $40 million budgets that would only earn back something like $2 million. Jacques Audiard's "The Sisters Brothers" is one of those movies.
It's sad because this is clearly a movie made with intention and nuance. Audiard is a major filmmaker, here coming off a Palme D'Or at Cannes for "Dheepan". The eponymous siblings are played by Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly, the former smack in the middle of his Joaquinaissance and right before "Joker" (which won't be reviewed on this site since basic cable mainlined it pretty heavily while I was down). And they even got showy supporting roles for Riz Ahmed and the Prince of Persia himself, Jake Gyllenhaal.
But this is not a western based in shootouts and action. If anything, chief blame for the bloodshed goes to the Commodore, a character that has no lines and barely appears onscreen (yet is personified by the late great Rutger Hauer). There are no romantic interests, no hissing villains. There is a quest, on order of the Commodore, which makes the movie something of a throwback, before the internet, where the sensation of discovering new land by horseback was accessible by the big screen only. Imagine, if you gave a young kid today, the choice between Google Earth and "Jeremiah Johnson". Also, get off my lawn with your trip hop dubstep.
The story involves the two quirky adventurers played by Phoenix and Reilly seeking a rogue scientist. Being the wild west, this is just a wild guy in glasses writing in notepads (Ahmed). But the narrative is carried by the core relationship between these two squabbling siblings. It's nice to see the normally miserable Phoenix as the rambunctious, sprightly fellow, boozing and whoring his way across the west. Reilly is far more conservative, alienated by his brother's tactics. There is natural tension from the fact that Reilly sensibly wishes to retire from their bounty hunting ways, whereas Phoenix somehow feels he can do this forever.
The movie does have an angle I've never seen before, in that an alternate title could be John C. Reilly Learns Things. It makes sense that people of an earlier time who weren't well read would be completely oblivious to the advancements of the world. As such, there are sequences where Reilly discovers indoor plumbing and toothpaste, and the actors' palpable joy is a highlight. When I first got out of prison, my brother took me to a McDonald's (we were in a hurry) where he ordered off a glass screen in a lobby without talking or pulling out his credit card, and I was mystified. I can relate to this specific Sister Brother. Every day is the future.
Hardcore purists of the genre might scoff at this film featuring a MacGuffin straight out of a genre film. I won't spoil it but it's a little fantastical, and I was sort of wondering if maybe a Marvel villain would beat them to it (never mind that it's in the possession of the actors who played Marvel villains Riot and Mysterio). Still, what's interesting (and probably commercial suicide) is that the MacGuffin in question ends up bringing potential enemies together, a camaraderie you don't normally see in oaters like this.
In the end, this is a story about getting home. I am spoiling the end for you, by the way, something I won’t make a practice doing. The final moments see the brothers, broken and broke, arriving at their mother's. She gives them the warmest of embraces, and their big beefy hands wash over tiny Carol Kane. She cooks for them and they nap, the sun pouring through the windows of their boyhood home.
Incarceration is meant to infantilize you. They want to reduce you to your more docile state. That's how they control a prison population that considerably outnumbers the staff. But among each other, there is the artificial need to perform an aggressive, assaultive masculinity. Men in prison play-act as tough guys, the mark of an adult man being who will adopt violence first and often last. The mark of a man is purely based on how quick you are to raise your hands. You have to maintain this performance all the time. When you are sitting with associates, you have to present an aura of violence and threat. Even when joking, each man has to introduce an air of, "don't play too much." They want you to be a kid, and because it's inorganic, men adopt the sort of masculinity usually adopted by boys pretending to be men. Girls can be women, or they can be girls. But there's a lot of pressure on boys to be men, to the point where they distort what that means. Phony performative masculinity also props up some pillars of our current “free” society.
But in the end, when we get out, we long for the performance to end. For some, it doesn't, which largely explains the high rates of recidivism. For others, once we find a safe space (in the arms of a parent), we retreat to this more authentic youth. We surrender to the feeling of a real mattress, the warmth of the sun, and a long, accepting embrace. And when we get out, all we want is to fall into a warm maternal embrace.