On The Sunny Side Of Deceit

When the title The Brothers Bloom appears onscreen, it’s against a black background, the gigantic letters spelled out in big fat lightbulbs, like the kind that frame the mirrors in backstage dressing rooms, a couple of them artfully burnt out, a couple of the others sending out showers of sparks, as if the very title contained too much energy to be safely contained by those thin spheres of glass. The Brothers Bloom! The Brothers Bloom! Here it comes, folks! The Brothers Bloom!

The Brothers Bloom is writer/director Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Brick, his nifty 2005 film noir variation which transplanted hardboiled Dashiell Hammett tropes into a high school setting. But where Brick was made independently on an astonishingly thrifty budget of about $450,000, with The Brothers Bloom, Johnson had $20,000,000 to play around with, and there isn’t a second of the film where you can’t feel him swinging for the fences — every frame is crowded with offbeat details and people in oddball costumes. There’s a moment where Johnson pans his camera across a dining room on an ocean liner, just in time for us to catch sight of a man trying to kiss the woman he’s sitting with and her pulling away — that little tableau is onscreen for a little less than a second, but you can imagine Johnson doing take after take to make sure it registers on camera for exactly the right amount of time.

It’s a con movie, a caper flick, though, which is a genre that easily accommodates a lot of playful touches. Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody are Stephen and Bloom, brothers and gentleman thieves. Stephen is the idea man, the designer of cons so elaborate that, as his brother says, they have the detail and thematic complexity of a Russian novel. Bloom, meanwhile, is always stuck playing leading man, “the vulnerable antihero,” and as the film opens, he finds himself having played so many artificial parts, ever since childhood, that he has no idea who he really is. He tells Stephen he’s quitting the grift to finally pursue “an unwritten life,” but his brother ropes him into one last con. The target: Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz), a fabulously wealthy young hermit who lives in an enormous mansion in New Jersey and spends her days accumulating random talents, from playing the harp to juggling chainsaws to taking photographs with a pinhole camera made out of a watermelon. (She never mastered driving, though; instead of braking, she appears simply to crash her sports car into the nearest wall, whereupon a truck promptly drives up with a replacement.)

I know, I know: the whole thing sounds like an explosion at the whimsy factor already, and I haven’t even mentioned the alcoholic camel, the one-eyed villain named Diamond Dog, or Stephen and Bloom’s partner in a crime, a silent female Japanese demolition expert named Bang Bang. It’s sort of a hybrid of a David Mamet con-man movie and an episode of Pushing Daisies.

It’s a lot of fun to watch — up to a point. I’d say that point occurs at around the 60-minute mark, when you realize that the conflict between Stephen and Bloom, and Bloom’s desire to escape from the artificial worlds his brother keeps forcing him to inhabit, hasn’t been dramatized very compellingly. It’s never clear exactly what Bloom wants out of life, what desires he can only fulfill by breaking free of the con, and Brody’s performance doesn’t project anything besides a general feeling of hangdog mopiness. Johnson tries a tricky tonal shift late in the film, but we don’t have enough emotion invested in these characters for him to pull it off.

Still, The Brothers Bloom offers enough incidental pleasures and clever visual gags to be an enjoyable watch, especially if you go in not caring if the film works as a whole. Its biggest asset is Rinko Kikuchi from Babel, who plays Bang Bang. The role would be offensive — she’s really just an exotic accessory to the two brothers — if it weren’t for the inspired Harpo Marx-style gags she keeps performing in the corner of the frame. I particularly savoured the sight of her on the deck of a ship, peeling an apple with a knife, throwing the naked apple overboard, and then daintily eating the peel.

That’s The Brothers Bloom for you: it focuses enormous attention on getting the peel off in one piece, and then it throws the apple away.