The Sisters Brothers (2018)

The Sisters Brothers arrives as a Western of the slow, sad, European variety, which is to say it is a film about men on horseback who are unhappy and remain so. Jacques Audiard, working in English for the first time, adapts Patrick deWitt's novel with the patience of someone who has never once been asked to hurry. Eli and Charlie Sisters ride toward a chemist, endure a series of misfortunes, and arrive at a river where gold is coaxed from the water by a caustic formula. The result is a picture of fine performances and no particular ideology. This is, in the present cultural moment, almost quaint.

The social consciousness on display is real but subdued. Riz Ahmed, a British-Pakistani actor, plays Hermann Warm in a frontier setting that history would have rendered almost entirely white, and Rebecca Root appears as the brothel keeper Mayfield. Neither decision is accompanied by a speech, a knowing glance, or a theme. The film simply proceeds. A faint anti-capitalist murmur rises from the Commodore's hired violence, from the greed of the gold rush, and from Warm's Fourierist community in Dallas, which he describes in a few sentences and never builds. The sermonizing, such as it is, lasts roughly as long as it takes to say the word phalanstère.

The remaining markers register nothing at all, and the film is both the better and the duller for it. There is no feminist argument, no racial reckoning, no climate parable, no body positivity, no neurodivergence, and no reconsideration of history beyond the usual Western habit of making the past look grubby. Charlie's drinking and violence are presented as wounds, not diagnoses. Rebecca Root's presence is not used to any narrative end, which is either a missed opportunity or a sign of confidence, depending on one's appetites. We are left with a handsomely mounted picture about two brothers, a bear, and a chemical burn. It won the Silver Lion for Best Direction at Venice, and it lost a great deal of money. Both outcomes feel proportionate.