Joaquin Phoenix And John C. Reilly's 2018 Western Should Have Never Flopped At The Box Office

Directed by Jacques Audiard, 2018's "The Sisters Brothers" is a surreal postmodern Western, to quote /Film's review of the movie. It plays like a classic Hollywood oater but slightly askew and refreshingly grounded, populating its setting with natural, awkward, human characters prone to fits of failure and suffused with bad luck. One might be tempted to describe the picture as a comedy, but anything that feels comedic is merely a result of the juxtaposition between the romance of the American West and the foibles its denizens have to deal with.

Early in the film, Eli Sisters (John C. Reilly) visits a trading post and is taught all about the modern miracle that is the toothbrush. A clerk explains that, when used properly, the toothbrush might help you keep your teeth for longer. It's implied in this scene that everyone in this world expects to lose their teeth eventually, and this sardonic humor keeps "The Sisters Brothers" buoyed throughout its runtime. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix play the titular brothers, Eli and Charlie, and although they are killers-for-hire, they're also just silly working stiffs trying to survive in a romantic land booming with money and activity. The boom, it seems, hasn't reached them.

"The Sisters Brothers" was made for a relatively modest $38 million, and it features several well-known character actors at their best. In addition to Reilly and Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a clever private investigator, while Riz Ahmed portrays a brilliant chemist with utopian dreams. In addition, Rutger Hauer portrays a key character known as the Commodore, and Carol Kane plays the Sisters Brothers' mother.

Sadly, Audiard's film was roundly ignored by audiences, only earning $14.6 million at the box office. This is a pity, as "The Sisters Brothers" is good.

The plot of "The Sisters Brothers" is largely straightforward. It's the early 1850s, and the mysterious Commodore has hired the Sisters Brothers to kill Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed), a prospector who has developed a chemical process that will allow him to more easily identify gold. (Eli, it's worth noting, is the pragmatic brother, while Charlie is prone to bouts of drunkenness.) The Commodore has also recruited a private investigator named John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) to locate Hermann and turn him over to the Sisters.

As it turns out, though, the Sisters Brothers can't catch a break: Charlie gets sick when he accidentally swallows a spider, Eli's horse is attacked by a bear, Charlie gets so drunk and/or hungover at times that he can barely ride, and at one point, the pair are even attacked by the denizens of a local brothel. These are not the ultra-cool, steel, black-hat-wearing assassins we're used to seeing in old-fashioned Westerns. Rather, they're unlucky souls that seem to have escaped from a Coen Brothers movie. At one point, the siblings begin debating if continuing their pursuit of Hermann is worth all this trouble. Eli, in fact, has already hatched a plan to retire from being an assassin and buy a local store with Charlie. The latter, however, is unable to give up his lifestyle and argues that they should push on. Thus, Eli begins to see the killing of Hermann as his "one last job."

As we know from decades of movies, though, "one last job" is typically code for a death sentence. Yet, the plot doesn't quite go where you'd expect. There's action, but it's not cathartic. Instead, people die in surprising and sometimes accidental ways, and the Sisters Brothers themselves are refreshingly pathetic.

Not many people saw "The Sisters Brothers," but critics were very positive towards it (as evidenced by its 87% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 211 reviews). The venerable Justin Chang, writing for the Los Angeles Times, remarked that Jacques Audiard's movie was refreshing in its willingness to amble, writing:

"[O]ne of the pleasures of 'The Sisters Brothers' [...] is its willingness to meander, to zig and zag en route to what might seem like an obvious destination. Where it arrives may not strike you as especially fresh territory, but the journey is strange enough to make you question what kind of movie you're watching. Is this a Western or a comedy? A grim morality tale or a shambling picaresque?" 

Both the positive and the negative reviews cited the film's "feel it out as you go" narrative, which takes audiences from one plot point to the next without any predictable beats or traditional rising action. The Old West, "The Sisters Brothers" seems to declare, was a boring and shapeless place. It was populated by excited gold rushers, dark ambitions, greed, murder, and professional assassins, but more than anything, it was full of long, dull days of horse riding, bleak nighttime attacks by spiders, and death that can feel accidental and random.

Why did filmgoers stay away? You could probably attribute that to multiple factors, but perhaps more than anything, a meandering, oblique Western was simply a hard sell. Nevertheless, one can currently check out "The Sisters Brothers" on Kanopy, one of the only streaming services you need to be cool. It's definitely worth a look.