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Rating: Eli Sisters decides to buy himself a toothbrush. His younger brother Charlie never misses an opportunity to harass him and make him feel bad about his weaknesses. He who drinks whiskey by the bottle and beds women in droves. He who doesn’t even think about retiring and starting an honest business.
The gunslinger with a gentle heart and his infamous brother, in short. Nice, but while watching, I kept thinking of other films of this genre, better ones. Let's put it this way: to get noticed with a western, you need something more than this, which still remains a very respectable work in all its parts.
Great characters, skillfully characterized by an experienced director, who plays with episodes and individual lines to create well-rounded portraits, using objects and now blurred memories. Beautiful images, fresh, as if Audiard were rethinking the genre from scratch in a film that is genre and beyond genre. Framing, lighting, editing: there is reasoning behind it, and it shows. Interesting themes gracefully implanted into the narrative device, like flowers suddenly blossoming from barren land. And the actors are good, no doubt about it.
So what's missing then? I don’t know, it lacks the charisma of a face that truly intimidates, like Christian Bale’s in the excellent Hostiles, which also shares some themes, such as the problematic rift between the wild world, law of the strongest, and the civilized world, law of the most just. It lacks a bit of true malice, of blood that frightens, to show this complicated historical phase, to make it feel, as well as speak it through characters and their “reflections.” Here, perhaps this film is too much like the good brother (John C. Reilly), while it needed a bit of the other’s wickedness (Joaquin Phoenix).
The indecision between comedy and dramatic film - which brings forward crucial issues - is the strength that allows for some unexpected narrative twists: the characters truly evolve, in body and spirit. But it's also the weakness, because the discourse comes off smooth, a bit too round, precisely because the story is about gunslingers putting away their iron. Some contradictions remain memorable, even if already addressed elsewhere: how necessary is evil to do good, to close with evil itself. Or: when one decides to stop, do all the dead they carry disappear? Are they forgiven? And all the feuds, how do you close them?
Telling the end of the West in a western, in short, a tasty paradox craved by many, which perhaps today is difficult to propose to an interested audience (and the box office confirms it), and without a jolt of charisma, a film even of quality like this struggles to take off.
7/10
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