BEFORE: I've really made a dent in that enormous pile of Academy screeners at work, the ones I haven't seen have been consolidated into two small stacks. Of course, it helps that as 2019 wore on, more of them became available on cable, Netflix and Hulu. As I found out that films became available to me via another method, I kept removing them from the stack. The next three films were all once on my list of screeners to bring home, but tonight's film became available on Hulu, and tomorrow's film is now on Amazon Prime. Still, you never know when a movie is going to disappear from a streaming site, so I tend to bring home the discs, just as a back-up. Tuesday's film is still not available anywhere for under $3.99, so this was a smart move.
John C. Reilly carries over again from "Stan & Ollie", but I have to cut his chain short - even though I have two more of his films in my possession, on the active watchlist, I'm going to need those films as a crucial link in the last days of the year. The tricky part of linking films is like is knowing when to hold a film back - I could have watched this film in July with other Jake Gyllenhaal movies, for example, but I needed to use it as a link tonight, so I held it back. Everything should still sort itself out when I add up everyone's totals for the year.
THE PLOT: In 1850's Oregon, the infamous duo of assassins, Eli and Charlie Sisters, chase a gold prospector and his unexpected ally.
AFTER: When I say they don't make Westerns like they used to, I kind of know what I'm talking about. The days of white hats vs. black hats, like in "High Noon" or "The Searchers", seem almost antiquated beyond their years. After the genre got shook up by "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" and then completely reinvented in the 1990's by films like "Unforgiven" and "Posse", people started enjoying the classic genre through a modernist lens. The latest trend in Western films is to erase those moral lines to the point where we may not even understand which characters are the "good guys" and which are the "bad guys". Does it even matter now? All that matters is who was left standing to tell their story, right?
And the other trick they use now is to make the films as brutal as possible - because it was a brutal time, get it? So that's logically how you end up with "Hostiles" and "The Revenant", with filmmakers pushing the envelope on how much misery and violence their characters can endure. And there's no real limit, once you factor in gunshots and arrow wounds and bear attacks, etc. "Jane Got a Gun", "The Hateful Eight", the remake of "The Magnificent Seven" - they all had high body counts and had characters with questionable motives. (In the last two years I've also watched "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" and "The Ridiculous 6", which go the other way as genre spoofs, but let's stick to the serious Westerns for the moment.)
I started last week with "Revengeance", a film about a bounty hunter, and now I'm back on the same topic - only we're back in 1851 today. Eli and Charlie Sisters work for the Commodore, tracking down targets and eliminating them, but they also manage to kill any other men (or horses) that get in their way. Subtlety is not one of the weapons in their arsenal, they just forge ahead from town to town and announce quite bluntly that's they're looking for so-and-so. So when the next target (another person on the run, a common theme last week) has something that the Commodore wants, he insists that they work with a "lead man", someone who will approach the target in advance, follow him around and perhaps even befriend him, then once the Sisters Brothers arrive in the right town, the target will either be incapacitated, or the lead man will at the very least know where he's holed up.
But the Sisters Brothers are their own worst enemy, even if they tend to win all of their gunfights (so far, so good...) Eli seems to have one health problem after another, while Charlie keeps getting so drunk that they're always making a late start the next day. So even with advance knowledge of where their target is, it takes them forever to get there, and he's likely moved on. Everyone in those days was heading out to San Francisco, this was during the California gold rush, before the Alaskan one. The brothers encounter more trouble in a town that seems a little too good to be true, the whores are friendly and the liquor flows a little too easily, so Eli senses that it's a honeypot set-up. Still, the brothers manage to fail upward and turn the situation to their advantage - when in doubt, just kill everyone else and take their money, then move on.
What the brothers don't know is that their lead man, John Morris, has been a little too successful in befriending the target, to the point where they've become friends, and something close to business partners. This relates to the thing that the target has and the Commodore wants, but there seems to be a way to turn it into a money-making proposition, and fund some kind of utopian society in Texas. It's tough to say if Warm, the target, is just really good at getting inside people's heads, or if Morris was truly unhappy as a bounty hunter and was looking for a way out. Maybe a combination of the two?
The other point about Western society that this film tries to make is that once you kill someone, then you've got to deal with that person's brother, or son, or roommate - once word gets out, each gunfight that you win means two or three other people who will be tracking you down for revenge. So, where does this cycle of violence end, if not with the gunslinger's own death? The Sisters Brothers eventually come to realize this themselves, because even if they do everything the Commodore wants, kill everyone he says, and work their way up the chain, what then? They can only go so far unless they take down the Commodore and replace him, so it's either get on with that, or get out of the game somehow.
For a time, it seems that the brothers also fall under Warm's spell, or maybe it's one of those cases where the friend of your enemy is also your enemy, even though he used to be your friend. But then if you reclassify both of them as your new friends, you realize that all of you have another common enemy. Umm, I think. Do you know what I mean? Again, modern times call for a modernist sort of Western, so it's like how Russia's not the U.S.'s enemy any more, but they're not really our friend, either. Same goes for China, or Iraq. Things get really foggy when nobody's actively fighting, and there are constantly shifting sands.
But eventually the brothers fail after attempting to leave their lives as bounty hunters - again, failing upwards seems to be what they're good at - and they have to go back and face the Commodore. What's odd to them at this point is that it feels like forever since anyone tried to kill them - what's it been, four days or even five? What I don't understand at this point is why they didn't just try to make it LOOK like they'd fulfilled their task, even if they hadn't. I think it would have been SO easy, but perhaps it didn't occur to them. Instead they ride all the way back to Oregon, just to find out why the heat was suddenly off of them, and prepare for a final showdown that never comes. It's almost a letdown, for them and the audience, but it is what it is.
Technically this is billed as a dark comedy, but with all the misfortunes that befall the brothers, I'm not sure if it qualifies as one for me. As always, your mileage may vary, but the dark comedy vibe is always such a tricky thing to nail down - too comic and it comes off as over-the-top, like "Heathers", and not funny enough and it's like, "Why even bother?" I think it stands up fine as a Western, one that's all about not just the brutal nature of the environment, but the futility of trying to accomplish anything. Maybe there's some ironic humor in that, but I'd be hard pressed to think of this as funny.
Now, funny would be some kind of Laurel & Hardy or Abbott & Costello "Who's on First?"-type of routine where there was some confusion over the fact that these two guys are brothers, but also "Sisters". But I suppose that would be too obvious.
Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "I'm Still Here"), Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"), Riz Ahmed (last seen in "Venom"), Rebecca Root (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Rutger Hauer (Last seen in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"), Carol Kane (last seen in "Thanks for Sharing"), Allison Tolman (last seen in "The House"), Ian Reddington, Aldo Maland (last seen in "Hanna"), Theo Exarchopoulos, Richard Brake (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Patrice Cossonneau, Hugo Dillon, Creed Bratton.
RATING: 6 out of 10 fur trappers with weird hats
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