Re-watch-ability is one of those things I usually scoff at others for valuing. Who cares if you don't want to watch it again? What matters is your experience of the art in the moment. Sure, we might love things more that we watch often (correlation or causation?), but surely that's just a measure of our personal taste. The more people I talk with, the more I find that their ideas of "good" movies heavily include their opinion of a film's re-watch-ability. I usually disagree.
Then I saw The Sisters Brothers and I had to concede.
The story follows the eponymous siblings as they roam the frontier in the employ of "the Commodore," a wealthy asshole who hires the brothers as hitmen. Their bounty: Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist whose new formula will help him easily find gold in California riverbeds. The Commodore had previously dispatched an assassin (Jake Gyllenhaal), but rather than murdering Warm, they had teamed up to strike it rich together. They make a handsome couple -- far more handsome and intelligent than the brothers teamed up to hunt them down.
The Sisters are almost immediately unlikable. Violent, brusque, and laughably grotesque, they stick out like cactus thorns. Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly are in turns funny and pathetic, with the occasional spice of hostility, but they're also irritating, mean, indulgent, and simple. They harbor dark secrets that do not endear them to us. They're fascinating, to be sure, like the film around them, but only enough to keep us interested for one go-round.
Bleak, dry comedy characterizes this picture, and while it's somewhat fresh and intriguing in the genre, it's also not enough to save the flick from its other trappings. Some moments feel inspired; I think immediately of the nightmarish scene in which a beastly tarantula enters a sleeping John C. Reilly's mouth and they each bite each other. Horrific, to be sure, but also weirdly inconsequential.
Later, in the bizarre town of Mayfield -- in which everything is named Mayfield -- the brothers run afoul of the town's namesake, who they think is conspiring against them. There is no proof of this, and her denial of knowledge of their bounty is only painted as dubious because of our perspective (though she then hires hitmen to eliminate the drunken, dangerous brothers). Surviving, the brothers torture and interrogate Mayfield before murdering and robbing her. It's an awkward series of disjointed, sharply edited images, culminating in the brutal death of a woman in power; it doesn't help that the actress (Rebecca Root) is a trans icon.
Then again, the film has its occasional charms. When Carol Kane shows up in the final scene as the mother Sister, my heart leapt for short-lived joy. And that's nearly the same sensation I felt with the picture in general. It's entertaining and diverting for its run time, but little in it feels important or memorable, and it leaves a somewhat confused aftertaste. And it's not one I ever need to see again.
IMDb: The Sisters Brothers
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