The Brothers Bloom

The Brothers Bloom (2008, Director: Rian Johnson): I’d been really anti­cip­ating this film after seeing Johnson’s debut Brick (2005) about a year ago, but looking at the trailer, I was a little wor­ried that he had strayed too far into Wes Anderson ter­ritory. The pres­ence of Adrien Brody riding on a train and a steam­ship and the metic­u­lous (and some­times ridicu­lous) art dir­ec­tion left me thinking that Johnson was bor­rowing just a little too much.

After seeing the com­plete film, I’m still of that opinion, but it didn’t make the film any less enjoy­able for me. It helps that I’m a big fan of Wes Anderson. Where Johnson dif­fers is in his full-throttle, go-for-broke style of storytelling. Just as in Brick, you’ll prob­ably either sign on early in the film or you’ll just tune out com­pletely. In my case, Johnson’s sharp ear for dia­logue and his sheer ball­si­ness as a film­maker imme­di­ately put me on his side.

The Brothers Bloom are Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and his younger brother Bloom (Adrien Brody). No, the names don’t really make sense. It’s okay. They’re a pair of conmen who like to live the high life by flee­cing suckers out of their money. Stephen is the “author” of the cons and he really does treat each job like a work of lit­er­ature. These pro­fes­sional liars make their living amongst the rich globe­trot­ting jet­set­ters who really only seem to exist in the movies. Bloom is the moony romantic who wants out, and Stephen agrees, if Bloom will go along on “one last job.” It so fig­ures that the last job involves the gor­geous Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz), who is both incred­ibly rich and incred­ibly naive. Predictably, Bloom falls for her. And pre­dict­ably, com­plic­a­tions ensue.

In fact, so many com­plic­a­tions and reversals and lies and double-crosses occur that even at the very end, I was unsure whether it wasn’t all going to be revealed as yet another level of the con, a la The Usual Suspects (1995). But for­tu­nately a real heart beats within Johnson’s whipsmart script, and the movie is sweet and silly and smart all at once. Stephen says it best: the per­fect con is the one where everyone gets what they want. In my opinion, the whole film is a clever meta­phor for film­making, and even though Johnson is making it all up, everyone gets to go away happy.

Official site of the film

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Rian Johnson and actors Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz and Mark Ruffalo from after the screening:

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Duration: 8:15

Director and stars at the premiere

(8/10)

Tagged as: #tiff08, conartists, conmen, heiresses, onelastjob