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Dir: Jacques Audiard
Starring: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal
(USA, 15, 2hrs 2mins)
Adapted from Patrick Dewitt’s Booker shortlisted novel, this melancholically funny western beguiles as successfully as its excellent source material. Set in 1850s Oregon it follows Eli and Charlie Sisters, played by John C Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix, assassins for hire.
They’ve been tasked with dispatching Riz Ahmed’s Kermit Warm on the say-so of The Commodore (a winning cameo from former replicant Ruger Hauer). Jake Gylenhaal’s prissy, verbose private investigator John Morris has also tracked their prey down, discovering that Warm has a way of detecting gold. This becomes rather attractive to everybody, resulting in violence.
Phoenix and Reilly make a great double act; Reilly is the world-weary peeved brother, believing that Phoenix gets more money than him because he’s what is known as the ‘lead killer’. He seems more sensitive than Phoenix’s coldblooded alcoholic, a cynic desensitized to the world around him. Both great actors, they can switch from humour to casual brutality in a second.
Jacques Audiard makes his English language debut after the brilliance of {A Prophet} and {Rust and Bone} and shows a keen sense of character and a vision of an American West that feels raw and uncompromising. Life on the trail is bleak and unpleasant, epitomized in a spider-based scene that will have arachnophobes running for cover. Ahmed, the idealistic voice of progress and Gyllenhaal the faux intellectual are both good supports, but what the film manages to capture is a sense of hollow masculinity.
There is a great sadness at work throughout; the two brothers are bereft of meaningful female company and they are inept killers who find themselves pursued with blackly comic results. It may be a little languorous and the plotting skittish, but this is an absorbing portrait of lost men in America.
words KEIRON SELF
Out in cinemas 5th April