The Sisters Brothers ★★★

It is genuinely tempting to describe Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers as a picaresque alt-western that’s mildly embarrassed of having been as competently assembled as it is. My hesitation’s mostly because I’m less than certain it ever wanted to be any of those things. I mean, yes it could accurately be described as a darkly comedic unconventionally paced and structured western. But, it’s also a film that’s both genuinely dramatically concerned with the utopianismn of the gold rush era west and one rife with often rough, drenched, lensing courtesy of its “classic” Spanish (Spaghetti Western) locations and of course cinematographer Benoît Debie. It’s performances are uniformly excellent but similarly of two minds as they spool out in two separate narrative tracts, neither of which works as well once they meet up. The film just isn’t enough of one thing or the other to decide what Sisters wanted you to think of it. You get the feeling that it wanted to be the story of characters who cross over out of a violently absurdist western fever into a picturesque utopian west but failed to engage you in then delineate its two worlds sharply enough to pull that off.