‘Bucking Fastard’ Review: Kate and Rooney Mara in Werner Herzog Fable

Nothing if not original, Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard casts Kate and Rooney Mara as Irish sisters who speak, think and move in unison, an impressive feat of disciplined acting that exerts its own peculiar fascination. At least for a while. Part of it is the identical outfits, a look that mixes Olsen twins with sister wives and a dash of Franciscan monk. Love the brocade granny handbags. But radical anti-fashion aside, this bizarro fable about unfulfilled love, oversized knitwear and abandoned story threads frays beyond repair, well before it reaches an abrupt and perplexing halt.

“We’re not twins, we’re sisters,” say Jean (Kate) and Joan Holbrooke (Rooney), who are introduced recounting the same dream of squawking birds from which they simultaneously awoke startled. Cue a slow pan across an aviary packed with noisy finches and parrots, a sequence that goes on long enough to suggest it means something — maybe that the sisters are caged birds destined never to be free? — though given that birds are not mentioned again, maybe not. Eventually the winged creatures are traded for a Fantastic Mr. Fox refugee, but let’s leave that for later.

The more intriguing introduction happens shortly after, when Jeanie and Joanie appear as defendants in a court hearing at which their neighbor and former lover daddy, Gareth Mulroney (Orlando Bloom, adopting a thick and largely convincing Irish accent), has filed for a restraining order. “My cowgirls, they rode me well!” declares the beer-swilling Mulroney, which still titillates the Holbrooke sisters even if they are furious that he married someone else, maintaining that he loves only them.

For as long as we remain in the courtroom, where the judge (Simon Delaney) has made an exception to the standard ruling that only one witness can testify at a time, the oddball movie is frequently funny, and the Maras are a bonkers treat — locking eyes in moments of doubt or snickering conspiratorially when the mood strikes them.

Flashbacks to their nights of intoxicating passion with Mulroney and their attempts to sabotage his marriage after he and his unseen bride return from their honeymoon — Ambush! Arson! Pornographic moaning beneath his bedroom window at night! — give the illusion of narrative momentum. But that begins to dissipate soon after they leave behind their childhood home and move to the city, having been offered a free place to stay by kindly neighborhood acquaintance Mr. Westmoreland (John Kavanagh), who is appalled that the tabloids have branded them “the love-crazed sisters.” Despite their body-canceling wardrobe choices, they are thirsty AF, so it’s not surprising.

The sisters become the fixation of a forklift-driving mouth breather (John Connors) and are photographed while undressing by a neighbor (Malcolm Adams) who climbs up on the roof across the street to spy on them. When they are informed that the risqué shots have been posted online, they seem tickled, even turned on by the violation. But they insist with amusing naïveté: “There cannot be pictures on the internet because we don’t have the internet!”

When they are not daydreaming of sailing away on the Love Boat, most of Jeanie and Joanie’s time in the seaport city is spent with social services employee Timothy (Domhnall Gleeson), who goes to great lengths to demonstrate that independent actions can be more efficient than four-handed attempts to open a can of sardines or maneuver a vacuum cleaner. 

There’s a droll interlude in which they crash the wedding of strangers, claiming to be bridesmaids, but the closest thing to a sustained storyline only comes when they accept the invitation of their recently widowed Auntie Louise (Marion O’Dwyer) to go and stay with her on the West coast. It’s there that the sisters finally stumble onto a place where their craziness barely stands out.

Initially, their aunt appears to have summoned them there for free labor with the housework, garden and hens. But when local farmer McFarlane (Brendan Conroy) shows them a warren of caves on the other side of a mountain, the sisters become caught up in a project that consumes them for years, slowly chipping away at the rock face to extend an underground tunnel, which peasants once believed was connected to the Orkney Islands.

Caves, remote landscapes and Sisyphian obsessions are right up Herzog’s alley, and it’s impossible not to be charmed to some degree by Bucking Fastard’s strangeness. But there’s nothing substantive enough here to alter the course of the director’s underwhelming recent narrative features. Even the woozy strings of Ernst Reijseger’s score wear out their welcome.

Herzog dedicates the movie to David Lynch, and it’s easy to imagine the late avant-garde visionary being amused by the batty scenario. But it’s also possible to imagine him having a more satisfyingly developed take on the idiosyncratic story, very loosely inspired by identical twin sisters Herzog met four decades ago, from York in northern England.

What cannot be faulted is how fully the Mara Sisters commit to the psychological and physical symbiosis of their precisely synced characters. But although the mysterious connections between siblings are an area ripe for exploration, Herzog doesn’t seem all that interested beyond the quirk factor, making the film seem precious rather than perceptive. Even when Jean and Joan follow their pet fox Cupid into a cave full of geological wonders and poetic potential access to another world, it’s hard to invest in them beyond the captivating eccentricity of the actors.