Review: "The Sisters Brothers"

You might be tempted at first to think "The Sisters Brothers" is a Western comedy. It stars John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as a pair of gunslinger siblings operating out of the Pacific Northwest circa 1851. One's a drunk, the other's a wet rag, and the trailer makes it look like they get into all sorts of hijinks while frequently tussling verbally and occasionally physically.

But this is a serious-as-salt production from French director Jacques Audiard, who has made some excellent pictures including "Rust and Bone" and the little-seen but marvelous "Dheepan." He adapted the screenplay along with Thomas Bidegain from Patrick deWitt's novel of the same name.

It's part anti-Western, part existentialist rumination on manhood, along with a decent amount of shoot-em-up thrown in. The movie feels like a bunch of eclectic pieces that work well together, for awhile.

Charlie Sisters (Phoenix) is the hard-bitten one of the pair, a born killer who has no thoughts beyond earning his next bounty and spending it on drink and whores. Eli (Reilly) is the older, wiser one. He's not soft; he doesn't hesitate to put a bullet in a man's head when he's down. But he does these things because it is Charlie's way, and so it must be his as well.

He is his brother's keeper, which he regards as both duty and prison.

They work for a man called the Commodore (Rutger Hauer, only glimpsed) who sends them off on various assassination missions. They all involve revenge for stealing something from the Commodore. Eli ponders aloud why the Commodore is robbed so frequently. Charlie doesn't really care.

Their latest job involves Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist who has come up with a formula that he thinks will make it easier to pan gold from the water in California. Jake Gyllenhall plays John Morris, a detective assigned to locate Warm and track him until the Sisters Brothers can arrive.

Morris is a curious figure. He doesn't seem prone to violence, has the refined manners of a rich man's son and mostly watches his quarry from a distance while writing his thoughts into a journal he's keeping. Unlike the Sisters, we get the sense manhunting is simply a phase he's passing through on the way to other adventures.

I won't give the plot away, other than the first two-thirds of the story involves following these two men in their parallel journeys, one pair tracking the other on their way down the coast to San Francisco.

Phoenix has been giving one terrific, offbeat performance after another lately, but here he plays a more or less straight character, a prototypical Western anti-hero. He's very deliberate about not thinking too hard about anything. Eli, on the other hand, is a cauldron of swirling thoughts and regrets. He carries a red shawl from a lady friend like a totem, a reminder of their fading youth and foul choices.

It's probably one of Reilly's best performances. Unfortunately, the movie loses steam during its last half-hour or so. The story reaches a natural end point, and then it keeps wandering away on the prairie, like a cowpoke with nowhere to go and in no hurry to get there.

Review: "Les Cowboys"

At the finale of “The Searchers,” perhaps the most seminal Western film ever made, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) finally catches up with the niece who was kidnapped years earlier by Comanches. A violent and virulently racist man, Ethan has vowed to kill her himself rather than let a white girl continue to live as an Indian. But then he embraces the niece and brings her back into the arms of their family. Love wins over hate.

“The Cowboys” is part ode to John Ford’s masterpiece, and part repudiation of it. Here, love does not always win, and often hate and anger define us, or at least our actions.

It’s a modern French Western -- and who knew there was such a thing? -- whose novelty is more praiseworthy than its execution. Thomas Bidegain is a noted screenwriter -- “A Prophet, “Rust and Bone” -- making his directorial debut with this movie, which he co-wrote with Noé Debré.

It consciously parallels the narrative of “The Searchers,” with a bitter authority figure who gives up everything in pursuit of a female relative taken by men he regards as alien and savage. In tow is a younger man, whose attitudes are less severe, but he ends up making the quest his own.

Initially set in 1994, the story encompasses about a decade and a half. François Damiens plays Alain Balland, a businessman who sidelines as a crooner at cowboy festivals and such, sporting a black 10-gallon hat and a swagger. His wife (Agathe Dronne) and kids enthusiastically join in the fun. But then his 16-year-old daughter, Kelly (Iliana Zabeth), disappears out of the blue.

The cops are unhelpful, the bureaucrats irritating, the leads quickly hit dead ends. Alain’s only clue is a curt letter from Kelly telling them she’s found a new life and not to seek her out. He is not the sort of man to lay aside what he sees as his duty, so he keeps looking.

It appears Kelly ran off with a boyfriend, Ahmed, a Muslim immigrant, which mortifies Alain. He angrily denounces the boy’s parents as “ragheads,” though they seem decent folk. Alain gets close a couple of times, but then the trail dries up.

Flash forward a few years. Alain is thicker, grayer, but no less determined. His son, Georges (Finnegan Oldfield), is now a teen and his resentful companion in the hunt. They go to Belgium, meet with forgers, pay off informants. Funds and help are scarce -- Alain has long ago abandoned his career and marriage -- so they resort to stealing gas to continue.

The journey goes on and on, post-9/11, into the Middle East -- troubled places where Islamic radicalism hold sway. John C. Reilly shows up as an American agent of dubious intent, offering help while carrying out his own shadowy pursuits.

Damiens is a haunting presence, a man who will do anything in pursuit of what he deems right, even if he commits much wrong along the way. Oldfield grows before our eyes from a timid youngster to a hardened man who unwittingly takes up his father’s mantle, and methods.

The story takes too long getting where it wants to, then seems in a terrible hurry to wrap things up in the final act. Momentous life-changing events are given short shrift with too little screen time for the emotional impact to land. A late-arriving character, a Pakistani woman named Shazhana (Ellora Torchia), is introduced more as an idea than a believable person.

It’s an interesting of not entirely successful film. There’s no shame in imitating a classic and falling short, as “Les Cowboys” does.

 

Review: "Dheepan"

"Dheepan" won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and deservedly so. It's a French film that examines the lives of a family of refugees who fled to Paris, an issue very much top of mind these days. Director Jacques Audiard ("Rust and Bone"), who co-wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debr, gives an empathetic look at people from an exotic land struggling to assimilate in the West.

Things would be hard enough for Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan), his wife Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and their 9-year-old daughter, Illayaal, (Claudine Vinasithamb). They're destitute people from warn-torn Sri Lanka, where the Tamil Tigers have fought a decades-long insurgency, and speak only a few words of French. They're placed in a public-assistance slum where drug dealers control every walk of life.

But there's an additional challenge for this family: they're not who they say they are.

Dheepan was actually a Tamil fighter who deserted after his real family was killed. Enlisting a random young woman in a refugee camp, they find an unwanted girl and together pose as a dead family, using their identification and concocted stories to gain access to French sanctuary.

So in addition to having to adapt to an alien culture and language, they're also negotiating a delicate dance as strangers who have to pass themselves off as loved ones. What makes the story so compelling is that they start off as an ersatz family and gradually evolve into a real one.

Dheepan is sober and serious, a man foreign to smiles and laughter. At one point he asks Yalini if she understands French jokes. She, naturally more sunny, tells him that he doesn't get their jokes because he has no sense of humor to begin with. 

He is given a job as caretaker for a cluster of buildings -- part janitor, part postmaster, part engineer. He takes his duties seriously but is constantly harassed by the criminals who truly run the place, making him wait outside before he can go in and sweep up their garbage. They dismiss him as the funny little foreign man, not knowing he's a trained soldier who's killed more men than all of them combined.

For her part, Yalini is enlisted to work for an old man (Faouzi Bensaïdi) who lives in the rougher building across the way, where Dheepan has been warned not to go. The man's nephew, Brahim (Vincent Rottiers), is soon released from prison and takes up residence in the apartment, wearing an ankle monitor while he starts directing the criminal activity in the neighborhood. They form an odd bond, since Yalini labors to forge one with her supposed husband.

Meanwhile, young Illayaal struggles in school, set apart by the language barrier and the brush-off from some mean girls. But she slowly begins to transition to a healthier state, in many ways better than her "parents."

This is a very emotionally delicate tale, and the cast and crew pull off a remarkable feat in making all of the major characters relatable, even if their cultural background or motives might seem strange to us. Yalini gradually breaks out of the shell of housework and child-rearing women of her background are expected to stick to. And Dheepan confronts some of the chauvinistic and militaristic attitudes of his past with newfound disdain.

"Did you end up believing this story?" Yalini taunts him at one point, after a brief romantic flowering between the two has eroded into despair and strife. 

"Dheepan" is a story about the stories we tell ourselves, and finding that the greatest lies can become truth if we embrace them long and hard enough.

Review: "Rust and Bone"

"Rust and Bone" isn't about the relationship between two characters so much as their intersection.

These are people leading separate and very different lives until a random encounter at a bar. She gets into a drunken scrap, and he is the bouncer who helps her get home. Things would probably have ended there, except that she suffers a horrible tragedy and reaches out to someone, anyone who can serve as a lifeline. He's available and willing, and they form a bond that is something more than friendship, but less than soul mates.

Marion Cotillard gives a brave, understated performance as Stéphanie, a woman who trains orca whales at the French equivalent of Sea World. She loves her job, though it's clear from her expression during a performance that it's gotten a bit stale for her. Then an accident occurs, the stage supporting the trainers crashes into the water tank, and Stéphanie wakes up in the hospital to find both her legs have been amputated.

"What have you done with my legs?!?" she shrieks at the helpless nurse, in a scene that pierces us with its emotional thrust.

Director Jacques Audiard ("A Prophet"), who co-wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bidegain based on a short story by Craig Davidson, is circumspect about what exactly happened to her. Shots of the killer whale approaching with teeth thrashing would suggest that the panicked animal bit off her legs. No one else from the show was apparently injured, so this seems the best explanation.

Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a young roustabout with a 5-year-old son, Sam (Armand Verdure), in tow. When we first meet them, they are riding on a train, hungry and desperate. Ali scrapes together leftover food from the empty seats to keep them fed. He boosts a phone from a store, fleeing the security as Sam stands a few feet away.

We're not exactly sure what has happened, but the pair is completely indigent. They are traveling to Ali's sister, Anna (Corinne Masiero) for refuge. Ali has worked itinerant as a security guard, and manages to cobble together a couple of jobs at the bar and night security at a big-box store.

At the latter he meets Martial (Bouli Lanners), who installs secret cameras throughout the store. Ostensibly these are to monitor the customers, but Martial confides they are actually to spy on the employees. Martial also runs a side business managing street fighters, and recruits Ali. It's fast money, and a lot of it, so he's eager to dive in, shrugging off the threat of injury.

Neither Ali or Stéphanie are perfect, or even necessarily good, people. Stéphanie confesses that her relationships with men involve her teasing and taunting them, getting them turned on and then dumping them when she soon grows bored. There's no hint of what happened to her current beau after her accident, but either he took off her she shut him out. She spends a few months isolating herself in a convalescence home, seeing virtually no one until she gives Ali a call out of the blue.

Ali is both easier and harder to understand. He exists as pure id, a man comfortable with physical brutality who does not seem to spend more than a few seconds pondering anything. When people ask him how he is, he tends to just say "normal" or "OP," meaning operational. To him, as long as there is food, work, a place to sleep, someone to watch over his kid (something he tends to slack off on) and occasional sex, life is grand.

To say that Ali is not in touch with his feelings is an understatement; he's not in touch with anyone else's feelings, either. Sometimes we get the sense he's unacquainted with the very concept of feelings.

The push and pull of their relationship goes back and forth. At first she is the driver, leaning on Ali (literally) to help get her out of her shut-in funk. He takes her to the beach for a swim, out to social events, and even offers to sleep with her to find out if her libido has survived her ordeal. (It has. Libidos tend to survive just about everything.)

But then Ali starts to subtly push her away. He waits until they're fairly deep into their friendship before he even reveals he has a son. He takes her with him to his illegal fights. He takes her to a club and then picks up another woman and leaves with her.

I enjoyed "Rust and Bone" for its strong performances, even as I never really felt like I got under the characters' skins. Ali exists as a Stanley Kowalski-esque primal beast, and her attraction to him is laced with an undercurrent of repulsion that's difficult to grasp.

The story is organic to the point of feeling unstructured, as events unspool without much rhyme or reason. The characters drift about, crashing into each other and then sliding away, so the impacts aren't as forceful as they might be. A little more narrative coherence would have served the filmmakers better.

2.5 stars out of four