Last Night I Watched: The Brothers Bloom

Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo
Length: 114 minutes
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008

 “When it comes to the story of the con man, I’ve heard them all”.

Rian Johnson is known mainly for the rural sci-fi epic Looper (2012), the high-school noir Brick (2005), and his directing stints on Vince Gilligan’s monumental TV show Breaking Bad. The downside to such great work is that the merely decent stuff sometimes gets forgotten about. Fanciful, kinetic and outlandish, The Brothers Bloom, while no masterpiece, is an undeservedly over-looked film. I feel that against Brick and Looper it’s easy to see why The Brothers Bloom is overlooked – Brick sells its peculiar set up with an absolute straight-facedness which is difficult to forget, and Looper’s unique setting, mind-bending time travel plot and explosive, expertly shot action scenes – whilst The Brothers Bloom, for all its weirdness and whimsy, feels like a more casual project – lighter, lower stakes, less attention.

The film purposefully takes the classic tropes of con capers, and proceeds to play with them, exaggerating certain elements to hilarious absurdity. Like Brick before it, The Brothers Bloom is a modern film rooted in classical Hollywood clichés, and is very aware of it. The tone meets a halfway point between Brick and a typical Wes Anderson film – with a mostly European setting which brings a pretty and quite rustic aesthetic, peculiar humour, strange, quick dialogue, and equally quick cutaway gags – funnily enough, the film was released just a year after The Darjeeling Unlimited (2007), an Anderson film in which Brody plays someone’s brother.

The light and upbeat score by Johnson’s cousin Nathan Johnson doesn’t help to distinguish Johnson’s film from something out of Anderson’s repertoire, but this is not to say that it isn’t great – the score seamlessly crosses from light and upbeat, to anarchic and loud, melodramatic, to quietly moving and back again. The cinematography itself, while not as symmetrical as one would now expect from Wes Anderson, combines bright, vivid colours that bring to mind Bryan Fuller’s short-lived TV show Pushing Daisies, with mostly static cameras with the occasional burst of movement.

All that said, the film has a kind of smugness and self-satisfaction to it from the very beginning that can be off-putting to some, especially considering the re-treading of various tropes and styles.

The structure of the narrative, the opening of the film in particular evokes the style of fairy tales – opening at the very beginning, with an unknown omniscient narrator even speaking in rhyming verse, bringing a fantastical atmosphere to the telling of the tale of Bloom (Adrien Brody) and his older brother Stephen (Mark Ruffalo). Orphaned from an early age, and naturally being social outcasts, the brothers take to running confidence tricks on unsuspecting children. Bloom, the more romantic and whimsical of the pair, struggles to separate his feelings from the job, often ends up just following the lead of the somewhat sociopathic and anarchic Stephen – as made clear by his notebook: every location is introduced with scribbles as if drawn by Stephen, as he orchestrates almost every event of the film. As such the story is wild, fanciful, and dragging Bloom along for the ride.

Penelope (Rachel Weisz) is probably one of the most eccentric and absurd love interests I’ve seen in a while. Her character is introduced in a suitably weird fashion, crashing her Lamborghini (she trashes 3 in about 20 minutes) into a stone fountain, having a second shipped up the road, and proceeding to play the harp in her garden.

The film cuts to 25 years later, to a burning library in Berlin, where an absolutely bizarre scene plays out in which an English accented Bloom is ‘murdered’ by a sweaty man in a tracksuit, being egged on by a Russian Stephen. The cons of the Brothers Bloom have become far more elaborate, their years of grifting people together leading to a deeper understanding of how people tick, and the addition of a mostly mute, Japanese explosives expert known only as Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi), and celebrity amongst fellow criminals; the brothers are the best of the best. Bloom is still tagging along with Stephen who literally “writes his life” with each con – and Bloom wants a life that’s unwritten. In addition to Ruffalo’s charming performance, Stephen is kept likeable and somewhat sympathetic, by showing that despite everything, his brother is his main concern – after all, Stephen created his first con to help Bloom talk to girls.

Through Brody’s sometimes excessive moping, it’s obvious that after 25 years, Bloom wants out – but, this being a con-caper, he has one more job to do.  Naturally, the setup of Bloom’s last con matches his first – “Bloom talks to girl”. Their new mark is a reclusive billionaire called Penelope, who by the end of the film threatens to usurp Brody’s mopey Bloom as the heart of the film. Rachel Weisz is great as Penelope, standing out amongst a pretty good cast. It definitely helps her that Penelope is probably one of the most eccentric and absurd love interests I’ve seen in a while. Her character is introduced in a suitably weird fashion, crashing her Lamborghini (she trashes 3 in about 20 minutes) into a stone fountain, having a second shipped up the road, and proceeding to play the harp in her garden. Penelope is about as talented, cut off and directionless as one would expect from a fictional reclusive billionaire and the quick-fire montage Johnson uses to display these various talents is hilarious, awkward and brilliant, so really befitting the character. As she is absorbed into the brothers’ con, it is quickly made clear that she is smart enough to see through elements of the fiction that the brothers create for her, but she is earnest enough and in a way, naïve enough to want to believe it. In fact, she shows more enthusiasm for the con than the others, so much so that she actually makes Adrien Brody smile for more than 30 seconds.

While not quite to the extent of Brick, the film delights in its strangeness, with arbitrary, hilarious mentions and images of one legged, boot riding cats and some extremely weird exposition about the duo’s former mentor, Diamond Dog (Maximilian Schell). Also like Brick, the film blends the old and new, albeit in an appropriately childish manner, as after all, it’s being written by Stephen: steam trains, typewriters, a lot of bowler hats and Lamborghinis. However it can also appear to be overly-whimsical at times, particularly with the relationship between Bloom and Penelope, but there are enough doses of reality, odd humour, and believable angst to prevent the film from becoming sickly sweet. Johnson particularly sells the strained relationship between the brothers, and in one of my favourite scenes, their characters never more clear than in the first confrontation with Diamond Dog – despite the villain being a smirking Eastern European who looks a lot like a pirate, the reactions he inspires in the brothers sells the animosity between them. Bloom quietly fumes, the more impulsive Steven reacts in a much more impulse, violent manner.

I wouldn’t argue that The Brothers Bloom is as accessible for everyone outside of those who are already familiar with or fans of Rian Johnson’s work (outside of Breaking Bad), but it quite successfully turns familiar, somewhat played out tropes into an interesting, funny and surprisingly emotional story. It’s similarities with the work of other auteurs helps rather than hinders, and the already electric script is elevated by its cast.

Image Source: Lionsgate Entertainment