By J. Rentilly
(Moving Pictures Winter issue 2010)

It's long been thought that two heads are better than one, but with "The Book of Eli," a powerhouse, post-apocalyptic Western featuring Denzel Washington, the Hughes brothers - twin, 37-year-old filmmakers Albert and Allen - finally carve the old adage into stone.

After barnstorming Hollywood nearly two decades ago with the brass knuckles and ghetto patois of "Menace II Society," made when they were only 20, the twins have labored hard to refine their aesthetic sensibility both within and without the Hollywood system while attempting to balance their individual artistic strengths: Allen's the congenial character and story guy, while Albert's the curmudgeonly visuals and tech guy. Or so goes the lore.

Resulting films, like "Dead Presidents" and "From Hell," have been solid even if they've leant more heavily to one or the other of the brothers' strengths. For example, "Hell," adapted from an Alan Moore graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, hung sensuously on Albert's sumptuous, ghoulish visual design, while Allen's knack for rich character and powerful plotting may have been given shorter shrift. After "Hell" rode a handbasket to mixed reviews and underwhelming box office, the brothers Hughes took a much-needed hiatus - "to live life a little bit," says Allen.

That was nine years ago. Many speculated that the "time out" was a classic Hollywood breakup, a Cain and Abel in Tinseltown, the fuel on that fire spilled by the brothers' own loose tongues. In a 2001 interview with Time, Albert accused his brother of having "gone Hollywood" and "gotten soft." In return, Allen logged the complaint that his sibling was "too into violence." The titans clashed, then parted ways - even if they never intended to stay off the silver screen for nearly a decade.

"When you're twins, it's beyond rivalry; there is a closeness that other siblings don't have, and then you also go to war like other siblings don't," says Allen. "There's bigger love and bloodier wars, man. But it's all good. It's all good."

With "Eli," the brothers are back. But don't call it a comeback, at least not yet; both are quick to reference LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out." "Don't call it a comeback I've been here for years," goes the song.

According to the Hughes brothers, they never went away. "There's always this rap on my brother and me that we don't like to work, and that's just not true," says Allen. "We've been trying to work - four or five movies that almost happened. We've done commercials and some TV. Just give us the green light, guys."

"Somebody's always getting cold feet - us or the studio," says Albert. "Truth is, we're pretty picky. We're not the guys that'll sell out and do something for a check. We figured if we're going to make a bad movie, it might as well be a movie we thought we could do well."

"Eli" is that movie - the one they thought they could do well. Really well. Allen says it's the first movie made by the brothers that actually needed both of them. "We made all the other movies together, but this one really required us both - the softie and the sociopath," he laughs. "Both of us are very present in this movie."

From a storytelling standpoint, the film about a lone hero (Washington) who fights to protect a sacred book that carries the secrets to saving mankind hews closely to traditional Westerns like "Shane," while jacking-in to a postmodern, end-of-the-world nihilism. Visually, the film takes a page, so to speak, from latter-day graphic novels and panoramic landscapes that look like John Ford by way of "Blade Runner." Allen refers to this fusion of their joint, disparate sensibilities as "merging the O's and 1's - the technology - with the I's and T's - the storytelling.

"We're taking the technical stuff - what Albert does - and the emotional - what I do - and making them dance together," Allen says. "That's always a hard dance. But we got it."

Albert says the film demanded more from him than any other they've worked on. He crafted "look books" - bound journals replete with notes, photographs, sketches and visual stimuli - for department heads, worked for months with some of the comic-book world's best artists, and nailed down a future world that audiences would connect with. "It's almost like we reverse-engineered the whole movie," notes Albert. "With ‘From Hell,' we actually had a graphic novel to draw on. With ‘Eli,' we didn't, but we wanted it to look like one. Frame for frame, the finished movie looks a lot like what we drew early on."

If Albert's visuals spin the Hughes Brothers' aesthetic into more surreal terrain, Allen credits his lead actors - Washington and Gary Oldman - with anchoring the film in a palpable emotional reality. "They are astute veterans. They take the page and whatever I had in my head, they make it that much more. But they're also very different actors," he says. "Denzel is more of a jazz, Miles Davis actor. He riffs, and you'd better have recorded it. Whatever it is, he will not do it again. You'd better catch the greatness. With Gary, he'll play it until he's happy and he's brilliant. He'll take challenging lines or blocking, and he thrives on making it work. ‘I'll rise to the challenge' - that's what he's always doing."

Albert jokes that working with talent of that caliber is what moviemaking is all about for him. "You get to be around all of these amazing people," he says. "You don't need to have talent yourself."

What becomes quickly clear in "The Book of Eli" is that, for all the new terrain, genre and high-voltage star power, it's still, thematically speaking, a Hughes Brothers movie; that is, it's a story of outlaws and outcasts seeking redemption against overwhelming odds.

Albert says the heroes of their movies have always been bad guys. "We like bad guys," he says, matter-of-factly. "I don't really know where that comes from. None of that stuff is really intentional."

Allen is more willing to pontificate. "At the end of the day, we're typical fatherless guys raised by a complete mother who was also biracial (half African-American, half Armenian). We always kind of never fit in. That made us outcasts," he says. "You look back sometimes and you find the patterns you've created in your life. It's quite a revelation sometimes."

Photo: The Hughes brothers on the set of "The Book of Eli"; courtesy Warner Bros.