Blood and gold

The Sisters Brothers is a darn good western, exceptionally lively and fresh, and better yet, one of the very best movies to come our way in what is already a very rewarding movie year.

Based on a very fine novel by Oregon writer Patrick DeWitt, it has a cast of American stars (Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal) and an esteemed French director (Jacques Audiard). The story is set in Gold Rush-era Oregon and California, and Audiard and company present all that quite evocatively, even though the actual shooting took place almost entirely in Spain and Romania. It impresses both as a thoroughly American tale and as a remarkably incisive “Euro-western.”

The capsule plot summary on imdb.com reads simply: “In 1850s Oregon, a gold prospector is chased by the infamous duo of assassins, the Sisters brothers.” The title characters (played by Phoenix and Reilly) are, of course, the heart of the matter here, but these “infamous assassins” are also the story’s anti-heroic protagonists, battling with past sins, with the treacheries of their fated “profession” and with and among themselves.

A particularly rich complication comes by way of the relationship that forms between Hermann Kermit Warm, the sought-after “prospector” (Riz Ahmed), and the gentlemanly John Morris (Gyllenhaal), who is more or less working in league with Charlie and Eli Sisters—with all three being employed by a lordly autocrat known as “The Commodore” (Rutger Hauer).

Morris and Warm ostensibly meet as sympathetically solitary souls, and are soon caught up in Warm’s schemes for a “recipe” of chemicals that will speed up the process of panning for gold as well as his hopes for a Utopian community free of violence and greed (in Texas!). As such, the two of them emerge, in effect, as a second set of radically conflicted “brothers” in The Sisters Brothers.

Some delicately brilliant acting turns up in moments involving those pairings. The nuanced ambiguities in the first conversations between Morris and Warm represent a particularly important case in point, and there are whole layers of near-demonic emotion in the ways Reilly and Phoenix look at each other in the course of their most contentious conversations.

From where I sit, Eli’s weirdly convoluted character and Reilly’s offhandedly mercurial performance in the role are emblematic of the film’s strongest appeals and its richest ironies. Eli is simultaneously a generic western character and an oddly ordinary guy, seemingly on loan from some dark-humored tragicomedy having nothing to do with the Old West.

Some of that same spirit is also at work in the fleeting interventions of three women in the story—an androgynous and tyrannical woman known only as “Mayfield” (Rebecca Root) who rules over an entire California town, a young prostitute (Allison Tollman) who indulges Eli with surprising sensitivity and dares to give him a crucial warning, and the brothers’ mother (Carol Kane) to whom they both return in a greatly diminished, but also somewhat enlightened, state.