The Sisters Brothers

What Jesse said:

Ok, I just watched The Sisters Brothers and thought it was a real mess of a movie but strangely… I ended up really enjoying it! Who knew? lol. So now I need you to go see it and tell me why I like it ’cause I can’t tell right now…

What Jesse said later:

I DON’T know why I ended up liking it.

It was ALL OVER THE PLACE!

And even later:

I feel the same way I did after watching Pet Detective…

Mike’s verdict:

Before this viewing my only recollection of John C. Reilly was from Step Brothers, so I spent at least the first 20 minutes expecting to watch a tedious, tasteless comedy. The eye-roll inducing title (which goes inexplicably unaddressed), and the fact that the film starts out in the middle of some larger story, only reinforced my belief. It wasn’t until it occurred to me that Joaquin Phoenix isn’t at all funny that I finally realized I was in for a simple western drama.

As a western, this film is predictable in terms of its glacial pace and focus on gritty, morally ambiguous, characters. Yet the plotline itself is less predictable than I anticipated, at least as a fictional story. There’s no time that the characters themselves react unexpectedly – you can easily understand and foresee the consequences of all their actions – but somehow the story is still entirely random.  The Sisters Brothers is an entirely unoriginal film but with a strangely original plot – any wester film could go in the direction that this film does, but none of them ever do.

The whole film feels like when you begin watching a movie after it has already started and then have to stop watching before the end. Things happen, and you can follow along, but there’s no explanation for why things are happening, and in the end you don’t really care about the titular characters.

That said, I would absolutely watch a prequel depicting the story of how Riz Ahmed‘s character Hermann Kermit Warm discovered his river gold illuminating chemical, how he came to the attention of The Commodore, and the development of his utopian town in Texas.  I think leaving out these aspects was a significant loss.  I would probably also watch a prequel explaining how Jake Gyllenhaal‘s John Morris came to be employed by The Commodore as solely a non-violent investigator while everyone else The Commodore is associated with is a cold-blooded killer.

Maybe this is the reason that Jesse thinks he likes the film – it hints at other stories that might address bigger, more interesting, and thought-provoking issues.

5/10