The
emphasis put on flash and spectacle in modern-day studio filmmaking has
helped subtly erode the mainstream attention span for literate, if
somewhat claustrophobic and overly brooding, dramatic fare like The Sisters,
a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical release in a handful of markets
from earlier this year that was a hit at the Tribeca, Santa Fe and
Sedona film festivals.

The movie is based on Anton Chekov’s
similarly titled play about three unhappy, provincial Russian siblings
who yearn to return to Moscow, but writer Richard Alfieri transposes
the turn-of-the-20th-century setting to that of an American university
campus. The action centers around a surprise birthday party for Irene
Prior (Swimfan’s Erika Christensen), thrown by her older sisters Marcia (A History of Violence’s Maria Bello) and Olga (Fried Green Tomatoes’
Mary Stuart Masterson). When guests both invited and uninvited show up,
rich opportunities for recollection, confession and confrontation all
come bubbling to the surface. A nice, counterbalancing collection of
male figures completes the ensemble, comprised of Alessandro Nivola as
the girls’ brother Andrew, Chris O’Donnell as Irene’s fiancé David,
Steven Culp as Marcia’s husband Harry, Rip Torn and Eric McCormack as
university faculty members and Tony Goldwyn as Vincent, a childhood
acquaintance of the trio with a secret crush on Marcia.

The cherubic Christensen, I’ll contend, is still the greatest
evidence of Steven Soderbergh’s directorial genius; she was riveting in
Traffic, and has been the opposite in pretty much everything
before and since. I still think she’s problematic as the fulcrum for a
story like this, but she at least holds her own a bit better here than
in The Upside of Anger. Bello, meanwhile, is a fiercely
watchable screen figure, and some enterprising indie director out there
would do well to tailor a meaty leading role to her, sit back and reap
part of the rewards. A film about the corrosive power of deception —
both with regards to others and oneself — The Sisters is a
deftly put together curio, particularly for those already familiar with
the source material. Those who haven’t read or seen Chekov’s play may
initially find the promise of the film’s rewards a bit far-flung, but
stick with it — there’s some solid pay-off here at the end.

The DVD comes in a regular Amray case, presented in a solid 1.85:1
widescreen transfer enhanced for 16×9 televisions, alongside an English
language Dolby digital 5.1 audio track that capably handles the movie’s
dialogue-heavy aural demands. Apart from The Sisters’s
theatrical trailer there are unfortunately no stand-alone supplemental
extra featurettes here, but director Seidelman and screenwriter Alfieri
sit for an audio commentary track that dishes hearty, if repetitive
praise on all the cast members, but also details some of the challenges
in updating such an imposing work. Optional English subtitles are also
included. B (Movie) C- (Disc)