Liverpool Sound and Vision rating 8.5/10
Cast: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rebecca Root, Allison Tolman, Ruger Hauer, Carol Kane, Patrice Cossonneau, David Gasman, Lenuta Bala, Ian Reddington, Aldo Maland, Theo Exarchopoulos, Sean Duggan, Raymond Waring, Johannes Haukur Johannesson, Gerard Cooke, Frederic Siuen, Trevor Allan Davies.
The Western was arguably a victim of its own success and the realisation that it held no meaning in an age where certain moments of history were being subject to closer and rightful scrutiny; the gung-ho feel of the interpreted hero and fatalism of the native American’s story not being considered beyond anything other than the role of the villain all combining to make The Western distasteful, to leave a sense of lies captured in the story.
Looking back at the ‘golden age’ of The Western now, with the possible exception of films such as Shane, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and High Noon, there is a lot to find repugnant, unpleasant about the way Hollywood portrayed the period of American expansion and the so called settling of the West. In later years a revival of the genre has meant that films had to be a true representation, more so that the white washed history of how the west was won, is not given credence, instead it must focus on a different way to explain the hardship faced, and where possible the extent of murder and genocide created in the name of the cowboy, the lone rider and the gang warfare faced.
The Sisters Brothers steps into that realm, on the foundations of films that reignited the interest such as Dances With Wolves and Tombstone, and into the modern era The Revenant, the superb The Homesman, and even 2010’s True Grit, a direct and wonderfully regarded film in which the antipathies of the John Wayne era is exposed for what it was, jingoism wrapped up in serial heroism.
A great cast captures the feeling of exposure to a land in which the characters are out of place as they chase down a man who has a formula to the extraction of gold from river beds, the open thought in the viewer’s eyes of the very nature of how we have poisoned the earth in search of riches, and the truth of how we are doing the same exact thing by fracking the ground; if in a hundred years they create an allegory tale of the city of Flint and set it against a Western backdrop it would have the same effect on the senses as The Sisters Brothers manages to create in its own film.
With superb performances by John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed and Rebecca Root, The Sisters Brothers is admirable, it delves into the offensive nature of man against his surroundings, of the isolation and how in the end it comes down to what you realise is home and truth. A marvellously paced narrative, shocking in parts, unapologetically real.
Ian D. Hall