There’s a lesser known Tragically Hip song I really, really like. It’s off of their hit 1998 record, “Phantom Power.” The band, if you don’t know, were a Canadian institution. Beginning in the late 1980s – well into the 2000s – The Hip were Canadian rock royalty. They sold millions of records in a country where just 50,000 would get you to the top of the charts.
What made them unique was that the band sounded like the Stones, but their lead singer was more Dylan than Jagger. Vocally distinct, lyrically cryptic and maniacally playful, Downie became a bizarre physical presence as well. Taking Joe Cocker’s spastic movements and then turning them into a kind of Chaplin meets Jagger pantomime and strut that was off the charts mad, Downie made himself damn near impossible not to focus on. He was part lead singer, part chameleon clown, part raging poet preacher.
Sadly, The Hip came to an end in a series of final concerts compelled by the news that Downie was dying of brain cancer. He left us on the night of Tuesday, October 17, 2017. A great Canadian artist was no more – but, what a gallery of work he and the band left us.
“Escape is at Hand for the Travelin’ Man”, that tune I referenced off the top, is one long, slow burn of a song. It’s a mid-tempo, laid back rocker that lulls you into a comfortable groove and, then, at about the 2:35 mark, explodes into a glorious storm of electric guitars over which Downie’s panicked and pained vocals soar like some great wounded bird escaping a torrential downpour.
It’s that long lull, though, that makes the chorus. Without it, it would not hit as hard.
The same could be said for “The Sisters Brothers” (2018). No, it’s not a song, but it also lulls you into a certain relaxed groove – a kind of music made up of both image and sound.
Though somewhat involving and somewhat compelling, the first part of TSB – the verses – nevertheless fails to grab you emotionally. The story hums along at a decent pace with some drama, some peril, but, though never boring, it plays somewhat flat. You may not realize it at the time, but the filmmakers are purposely holding back in order to make sure that the “chorus” – when it does arrive – hits you where you live.
In eating terms, this film is a one course meal. As moviegoers, we are so used to having our faces stuffed with big hunks of plot so often, that when a filmmaker chooses to keep our plates empty – for a longer period of time than we are used to – we begin to wonder what the hell’s going on. With stomachs rumbling, some will just get up and walk out – disgusted by the long wait for the very meager portions. Others, knowing it isn’t always about the frequency of service or the size of the portions, stay and settle in hoping that the it’ll be worth the wait.
As the title makes plain, this is the story of two brothers, Eli (Joaquin Phoenix) and Charlie (John C. Reilly) Sisters. Set in 1850s Oregon, we first find the Sisters working a job and that job is killing. Their God-like employer, the Commodore (Rutger Hauer) – who calls most of the shots in this new world of outlaws and prospectors – tells them who to kill and Eli and Charlie kill them.
The Sisters latest job sends them south to meet up with a man named Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal). He’s not the one with the bulls-eye on his back – that would be Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed). Morris has befriended an unsuspecting Warm and will hand him off to the Sisters as soon as they arrive.
Seems like a simple enough life and Eli is definitely into simple – he fully believes in the power that resides at the end of his gun and all the rewards that come with it. He delights in killing. You could say it’s his dream job. On the flip side, Charlie is sensitive and, though he kills as many as Eli, he is starting to question the Commodore’s moral authority. When Charlie wonders aloud about the Commodore’s motives, Eli rebuffs him. For Eli, there is no room for nuance, no room for doubt – we are hired-we kill-they deserve it. This comforting fiction is not available to someone like Charlie. He is much too wise to ways of the world to accept that fool’s gold.
Eli exudes toughness – even pretending to cry one night only to laugh in Charlie’s face when he comes to comfort him. He is cold and brutal. Though the younger of the two, he is also the one in charge – the Commodore trusts Eli with the full details of each and every job, not Charlie. But, the relationship between the Sisters is not all it seems – time and turmoil will soon reveal all.
Fundamentally, TSB is a film about masculinity and how it expresses itself in a given society. Through the Sisters, that expression is pure brutality. Their brutality, though, is borrowed – afterall, the Commodore is the one paying them. If the Commodore wanted the killing to stop – it would stop. Cogs in a machine, the Sisters, nevertheless, are men at their worst – they kill not in defense, nor to protect those they love or the vulnerable or the weak, but to sustain power they will never get anywhere near to and to enrich themselves along the way.
Despite all the killing, signs of male tenderness are scattered here and there. Charlie sleeps with a soft red shawl given to him by his girlfriend. Each night he holds it to his face and breathes in deeply. It’s telling that this loving expression of male tenderness is kept private. Charlie kills for the Commodore just like his brother, but his tenderness – also shown while trying to save horses from a fire and in a funny/touching scene involving a prostitute – is well hidden and the larger society is a poorer one for it.
As a western, we get the usual eye full of big skies, wide open spaces and majestic mountains. Plenty of mud, blood and men in saloons looking drunk and dangerous, too. The production is very pleasing to the eye and ear. It also has room for smaller moments involving toothbrushes, that shawl and a big fat spider to flesh out character, provide brief bits of ironic perversity and to take us, with icky efficiency, into our worst sleepytime fears.
But, that “chorus,” wow – once you see it and hear it and feel it, you cannot forget it. Not only did it remind me of that Hip song, but it also reminded me of a 2005 film called, “The Loneliest Planet.”
In it, Gael Garcia Bernal (“Amores Perros”, “Even the Rain”) and Hani Furstenberg (“Campfire”) play a young couple backpacking through the Caucasus Mountains. They walk and walk and we watch and watch and, then, something devastating happens. All that nothing leads to everything.
TSB’s “everything” is a brutally decisive moment that not only spins us off into an unexpected place far darker and emotionally devastating than we ever expected, but it also, somehow, magically transforms everything that preceded it. Up to this point, though well drawn and half-ways compelling, as characters, Eli and Charlie contained little depth and made only the softest of impressions. Afterwards, they transform before our eyes into figures of great tragedy deserving of our greatest sympathy – the before and after contrast is that stark. Their relationship to each other, too, changes. But, most importantly, from the very start, those changes were always present in embryonic form. All they needed were the right set of circumstances to push them out into the world all bloodied and bawling.
What follows are moments that are haunted and sick with the stench of death and the reek of end times come at last. Rich in irony, bathed in the blood of a long delayed reckoning, the final moments are also moving and otherworldly. God might be dead but the divine is still possible.
As TSB reached its midway point, I was about to reach over for the remote to shut it off. Am I glad I didn’t. How could this be?
It’s as if some guy, who you long ago dismissed as a doofus, got up at your birthday party and delivered a speech that moved you so deeply it brought tears to your eyes. “How the hell did that happen?” Who knows? Shut up and just enjoy the fact that it did.
A round of steady applause to book writer Patrick DeWitt, co-screenwriter Thomas Bidegain and co-screenwriter/director Jacques Audiard. Together they have created something unique and uncompromising. They seem to have captured all the boredom, cruelty, cheap thrills, and, yes, even the last few crumbs of tenderness that the people and places of 1850s America had to offer a stranger.
That they did it with patience, sensitivity and a remarkable feel for the savagery and softness of the human heart is all the more remarkable.
