Western film: The Sisters Brothers

“The Sisters Brothers.” Quirky, interesting, Western directed by a French dude. Thumbs up.
Its billed as a comedy but I didnt think of it as a comedy at all. The Riz Ahmed character outshines Joaquin Phoenix, John C Reilly and Gyllenhaal.

review:https://www.stabroeknews.com/2018/features/reel-encounters/09/10/2018-toronto-international-film-festival-diary-its-a-mans-world/

“…French director Jacques Audiard makes his English language debut in an unusual and sprawling comedy-western “The Sisters Brothers.” The film is an adaptation of a Patrick deWitt novel……The film follows the eponymous Sisters Brothers (played by John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix), a pair of assassins in the mid-19th century who become entangled in the events of the California Gold Rush.
…. The merciless gunfight that opens the film will not be the last. The men are journeying to track down Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist with an idea that a rich man wants. That’s the bare bones of the plot, which depends less on forward moving chronology than on its sprawling discursiveness.

Ahmed and Gyllenhaal are teaming up again after their stellar work on “Night Crawler” and during the Q&A at the end of the film, Gyllenhaal pointed out how the dynamic has changed since then. Here, it’s Ahemd’s beguiling scientist who seems to hold everything together. And in a way he is the essential glue keeping the bulk of the film’s main plot together. He’s the man everyone wants – albeit for different reasons. Ahmed’s bright eyes are his best asset, and although the film has little to say about race relations in the 1850s, his Asian presence within the film offers a welcome departure from the limited scope for non-white actors in Western. Ahmed’s performance is made all the more impactful against Gyllenhaal, who gives my favourite performance of the film as the taciturn and pedantic detective.

I’ll admit, I left the film wishing in an almost heretic way that the film was about those two men and not the two brothers. It’s not that what Audiard gives us is weak. The brothers’ narrative is consistently pulsating and consistently funny and John C Reilly, in particular, is spectacular in what’s probably his best performance. It’s easy to see why he was intrigued by the text…..”