You were supposed to see The Brothers Bloom saddled over the 2008/2009 border, with a limited run in late December over the holidays and a full run in theaters come January 2009. Then, the movie kept getting pushed back until now it’s a fun con man film that is forced to compete in a field full of blockbusters. If The Brothers Bloom opened alongside Oscar-baiting fare instead of explosions ad giant robots, the film would find the audience it deserves and surprise the up-their-own-a**es pretentious film goers with a smart romantic comedy. As it is now, it’s going to surprise f*ck-it-all summer film attendees with charming characters and a winding con man plot.
Either way, there is good reason to see Brothers Bloom, mainly because it’s good.
My mom is a big fan of summer movies to this day. The only problem this year was that she gathered a group of female friends to go see what looked to be the first big special effects film of the year. My mom enjoys movies where things explode or films with a light-hearted plot. I’m guessing that raising me helped develop her taste for escapism. Regardless, her friends are of similar ilk, which it why Mom messed up her film-reputation by taking a whole bunch of housewives to The Watchmen.
Just to cover my own butt here, if Mom had asked me about Watchmen, I would have told her to wait until it came out on Netflix. It just wasn’t her type of film. Now, people are hesitant to go see Wolverine with her, because they’re afraid they will get blasted in the face with more attempted rape and blue penises.
Mom: Take your lady friends to Brothers Bloom. It might be the one film this year that a group of Midwestern housewives and I might both enjoy. It’s like The Sting peppered with Oceans 11 and with the Rachel Weiz role you like.
As for the rest of you, I suppose I have some ’splaining to do…
I had a love affair with Rian Johnson’s debut film, Brick, a old fashioned noir detective story set unironically in high school. At the time of its release, I was studying what goes into making a noir film for a screenplay I was writing (though let’s not talk about my failed career, now), and was delighted to see another filmmaker who was able to pull the best pieces of a good noir detective story together, while giving it a new twist by putting Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s brooding high school outcast a mouthful of out-dated slang and a detective/commissioner relationship with his vice principal.
Brick went on to with the Originality of Vision prize at 2005’s Sundance film festival, grossing an estimated $2,075,743 for a film that cost somewhere around half-a-million dollars. And in an all-too-rare display of trust in a fairly-new filmmaker, someone green-lit The Brothers Bloom as his next project.
It’s possible that I’m going to have a prolonged love affair with this film to, as it is about con men, another much-beloved subject of mine, and also manages to take a genre so established and still turn out something that feels different from the other genre films I’ve seen before.
The film begins with a poem, narrated by Rain himself, introducing a young Bloom (destined to grow into Adrian Brody) and young Stephen (cursed to grow into Mark Ruffalo) as the two pull their first con around the age of 10. Through the pleasant tongue-in-cheek rhyme is initially contrasted against the Bloom children getting passed from foster to foster home, the prologue eventually turns to the whimsical when Bloom spies a cute little girl through some bushes and is afraid to talk to her. This leads Steven into planning his very first con, which he does using inter-connected boxes on a piece of paper, like the flow chart of a con. The very first box? Bloom has to befriend the little girl, setting up a long life of Bloom as the point man for the brothers’ cons and the bleeding heart of the family.
The film jumps ahead several decades and we open on older Steven and Bloom finishing up their latest con. We are introduced to the third member of the Brothers Bloom, the mute explosives expert Bang Bang (played by Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi), who just showed up one day and has been running cons with the Brothers since.
Over the decades, Steven has remained the brains of the operation, planning out cons with the same old-fashioned flow-charts and putting his brother in the central role. Within the first twenty minutes of the film, a depressed looking Bloom plays solitaire while Brick-vet Nora Zehetner makes a cameo appearance, throwing herself at the brooding Adrain Brody, who rebuffs her saying that he isn’t what she thinks he is, some sort of sympathetic hero, he is only what his brother writes for him to make money.
Bloom tries to quit the morning after their con goes off without a hitch, something we learn that he’s done after most of the recent cons. He wants to live a “real life,” one that his brother hasn’t written and planned for him. Steven is the more happy-go-lucky of the pair, though something about Ruffalo’s performance brings Steven’s true colors to the forefront: he’s the kind of character who would joke with you on the long walk to the gallows because he doesn’t want you to think about your impending death.
Bloom flees to Montenegro in an attempt to find real life at teh bottom of a bottle or the end of a cigar, but Steven eventually finds him and pitches his last mark, Penelope Stamp, an epileptic millionaire shut-in who collects hobbies she learns in books and rarely goes outside.
This is where the plot shifts into “high gear,” and by “high gear” I mean that if I were to try and describe it to you, my brain would follow so many tangents of things I found charming or questions I was asking myself that no one would benefit.
The Brothers Bloom arrives with buckets full of charm, and believe me when I say that if I hated it, I would feel just as obligated to tell you.
Rachel Weisz is going to win some hearts with her portrayal of Penelope Stamp, eccentric millionaire. This is the film that prevented Weisz from coming back for the third Mummy film, and thank sweet Jesus, because she pulls something entirely magical out of this role.
Remember when Garden State came out at the exact right time to hook all the twenty-something hipsters back onto Natalie Portman when she was doing little else than trying to balance out Hayden Christensen’s horrible Anakin Skywalker? Even though Portman’s Sam in Garden State did little more than do what Zach Braff needed her to, even if it seemed against her character, it was hard not to love the little indie/pixie dream girl. Weisz does something similar here, but manages to make it real.
Penelope didn’t get to leave the house during her youth, due to an amusing misunderstanding about her allergies, building a character made of innocence and honesty who longs for adventure. In a sequence that, in hindsight, was surprisingly too brief, we learn that Penelope “collects hobbies,” which she describes as finding something she wants to do, then reading books until she can do it. Weisz commits to the physical comedy to this series of clips, which sees her rapping, playing ping-pong, break dancing and juggling chainsaws, all with the cutest matter-of-fact look on her face, as if none of these various skills ever interested her. Everything Penelope does hinges on the audiences belief that she is little more than a 16-year-old girl who was unfortunate enough to be trapped in a huge house with lots of money. The scene where she receives her first open-mouthed kiss and is both surprised and elated by the feeling of open-mouth kissing is an absolute joy. Weisz portrayal of Penelope is a delicate balance; where Tugg Speedman from Tropic Thunder would have mistakenly gone full-retard, Weisz establishes a sophomoric heroine in the complex plot of a con movie.
And a lot of the charm of Brothers Bloom comes from the fun Rian lets his characters and cast have while he slowly shakes apart the conventions one would expect from a con film. The only thing I can think to compare it to is a Wes Anderson films where the actors are allowed to do something other than play unaffected. The characters are over-the-top wacky, but are strangely and almost inperceptively grounded in emotional reality.
Rinko Kikuchi as Bam Bam does great with the limited dialogue, using her time in the background of shots to give her character some interesting business until she gets to blow something up again. Ruffalo gets some character business to play around with, such as his “pick a card” magic trick that initially starts as a joke, then – as Steven’s motivations are made more apparent – quickly becomes a sad routine of a character that ultimately just wants to protect his brother.
Johnson has a strong visual hand in this film, wish some good framing and surreal shots early on in the picture. Particularly, towards the beginning, Adrian Brody’s Bloom sits on a roof, depressed with the lie of his life while sitting in front of a mural of a man with a gun to his head. When Steven enters the scene to talk him down, he enters through a door in the middle of the mural’s head. Also around this time, there is the addition of a throw-away joke about a drunk camel that hits, but not as much as the bizarre imagery of a drunk camel wandering around the rest of the scene. It’s shots and images like this that show a strong directorial presence. Perhaps too strong at times, but when you’re talking about a guy on his big-budget sophomore effort, you’re going to let him have wide Kubrick-esque establishing shots on moodily lit bars. It’s a silent message from Rian to those in his audience: “though this may seem mad-cap at times, I have my hand on the wheel.”
Though, the Brothers Bloom is less of a drive and more of a ride (I could have phrased that better if I wanted on the poster). As the film progresses, the story begins to fold back on itself, the idea of “con” and – predictably, but that’s why you showed up – the inevitable choice between the woman Bloom loves and the brother he will always love more. I don’t want to write, nor do you deserve spoilers, but I will say this: The screenplay Rian Johnson wrote for this film is pretty tight. With the exception of the drunk camel (I’m going to guess used more for its dream-like visual), any information you are given through dialogue or prolonged glances is there to inform you about the characters or the plot. It’s tight like Dark Knight tight, and I didn’t realize until the end of the film.
All things being equal, this is the first sign I look for when trying to judge just how good a film is. When I ran into people who claimed to enjoy Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, they were quick to write off excessive sequences like Shia swinging through the trees or unexplained temple guards, and while it’s fine to do that for summer flicks, excess plot should no be present in good films.
The Brothers Bloom kept me guessing about where the cons ended and what the real con even was all the way to the closing sequence, but when the last piece of the puzzle fell into place, I suddenly saw the whole piece for what it was: a hell of an entertaining con-man film and a damn impressive sophomore effort.
If we had to give it a number, we’d say 7.5/10. But we don’t like numbers. We like graphs.
