Rian Johnson’s globe-trotting caper comedy The Brothers Bloom is the movie equivalent of an elaborate juggling act whose performers keep dozens of pins wheeling in the air. As much as you admire the stagecraft and the technical skills on display, when all is said and done, that’s all it is: a fancy, not-quite-two-hour stunt.
What you take away from this snazzy-looking fantasy about fraternal grifters embarking on a final con are its travel brochure-pretty pictures of colorful locales including Prague, St Petersburg and Montenegro. Beyond that your response to the movie, which takes too conspicuous a delight in its own cleverness, is likely to be a shrug and a “so what?” Like those airborne pins, The Brothers Bloom never lands.
Johnson is certainly talented. Four years ago his debut feature, Brick, a film noir spoof set in a contemporary high school, announced the arrival of a director with a prodigious knowledge of film genres and a visual flair to match. But emotionally there was no there there. Flashier and glossier, The Brothers Bloom is a sideways move into a related genre: the more vacuous realm of the Ocean’s Eleven movies and their ilk. Rather like an Indiana Jones film, The Brothers Bloom layers movie styles, from noir to adventure serial to screwball comedy, to conjure a timeless present.
Instead of George Clooney and Brad Pitt, the eternally naughty boys suckering marks in a life of never-ending adventure are played by Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody. Ruffalo plays the older brother and the team’s conceptual maestro, Stephen, who plots each scam like a novel in which his younger sibling, identified only as Bloom (Brody), is cast as the protagonist.
Stephen also voices the movie’s glibly cynical philosophy that the best con is one in which everybody gets what he wants. In Stephen’s diabolically complex plots he is the only player who knows what is real and what is fake, and the guessing games go on until the last second.
As the put-upon assistant and tag-along in these schemes, Brody projects the soulful anxiety of a man who, after 25 years of being a willing collaborator in his brother’s scams, longs to live an unscripted life. Their story is introduced with a facetiously flowery narration by Ricky Jay, describing how the brothers were shuttled from foster home to foster home. An early con game, in which they collect US$2 from their schoolmates, is shown.
After the prologue the movie leaps ahead to the present, when Stephen prevails upon a reluctant Bloom to join in his ultimate con: the fleecing of Penelope (Rachel Weisz), a wealthy, eccentric New Jersey heiress who lives like a hermit in her castle. Penelope, who suggests an artier descendant of Weisz’s character in the first two Mummy movies, embraces con artistry with a fearless zest.
Once Weisz appears, The Brothers Bloom acquires some effervescence. Penelope’s talent for learning new skills is shown in an early montage in which she demonstrates her mastery of a circus’s worth of weird hobbies.
As the brothers lure her into a scheme that involves the theft, smuggling and resale of a priceless antiquarian book, Penelope emerges from her shell. Accompanying them on their international jaunt is a mute sidekick, Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi, from Babel), who is an expert in explosives.
Not long after meeting Penelope, Bloom falls in love with her, but the affair has little traction. It all builds up to an anticlimactic “is it real or is it fake?” finale in which Stephen may have met his match in treachery.
Extraneous characters who pop in and out, unnecessarily complicating matters, are Diamond Dog (Maximilian Schell), the brothers’ double-dealing mentor in con artistry, and the Curator (Robbie Coltrane), a smuggler of Belgian antiques.
With The Brothers Bloom Johnson joins the company of younger directors like Wes Anderson who equate smart, serious filmmaking with manipulating genres and copping attitudes. The flourishing of all that talent is exciting as far as it goes. But it is only a first step in turning movies into art.
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