Erudite, visceral and chuckle-worthy, this western is based on Patrick deWitt’s novel and starts out as the story of two gun-toting, chalk-and-cheese brothers, only to become more mysterious.
The setting is gold-rush America, and by the time we reach the middle section, we’re unsure if Charlie and Eli Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix and John C Reilly) really are the central characters.
That’s because two non-killers they have dealings with — John Morris and Hermann Warm (Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed) — seem equally, if not more deserving of attention. Bullets whizz through the air. So do ideas. The ground beneath our feet is fluid. And it feels good.
You’d expect no less of Jacques Audiard, the man beneath slippery prison epic A Prophet. He brings the best out in the cast, especially Ahmed and Gyllenhaal.
John is a dandy whose sentences incline towards the grandiloquent. Hermann is a pint-sized chemist who has something the brothers’ boss (Rutger Hauer) wants: a formula that will lead to untold riches, but Hermann isn’t interested in the gold for its own sake.
Thanks to ingenious make-up and Ahmed himself, the character’s eyes and cheeks shine in a way that’s both attractive and unsettling. Even in the blazing sun Hermann looks like he’s standing under a moonbeam. Is he a saintly pioneer? Or a wily madman? All we can say for sure is that the chemistry between him and John is super-intense.
The Sisters brothers are extremely diverting, but it’s the film’s designated sissies who make the project feel like one of a kind.
