The Con’s On You

Writer-director Rian Johnson fashions a universe in which time is a
fluid thing—where everything takes place in a familiar today and
an otherworldly yesterday, where the audience is at once agreeably
comfortable and inexplicably unsettled. When his characters don’t look
out of place in their derbies and dusters, they sound out of place,
like high school Hammetts. Johnson’s creations, inhabited thus far by
soulful actors giving career-best performances, always appear as if
they’ve materialized between eras, as if they’re caught between two
worlds—the yellowing then and the Technicolor now.

Johnson’s movies—first Brick in 2006, now The
Brothers Bloom—are clever and soulful confabulations. The
filmmaker, whose screenplays read like novels, serves up movies that
could play like would-be parodies: Brick, after all, was his
gumshoe-in-tennis-shoes noir starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a
slang-spouting baby Bogart on the hunt for his lady friend’s killer.
Could have played like a joke; it was anything but. Now comes The
Brothers Bloom, a love story—two, actually—that flirts
with the con-man movie clichés with which Johnson ultimately
can’t be bothered. Which is just as well.

In a confidence film, everyone is exactly who they say they are,
even when they insist they’re not who you think they are, or
something—a-ha! Johnson dispenses with that phony device
up-front; he doesn’t have an endgame gotcha up his sleeve and isn’t
interested in making a puzzle to be solved. Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and
Bloom (Adrien Brody) are, from first scene to last shot, precisely who
we think they are: lonely little fabulists who tell stories to find the
joy that eludes them in “the real world.” Cons provide an escape.

Stephen and Bloom (no last names, please) are kids when we first
meet them—young lost lads rejected by 38 sets of foster parents.
Johnson introduces them through a surrealist’s interpretation of a
Dickensian tale: They are orphans scamming for Bomb Pops in a dead-end
town where the one-legged cat, stuffed in an old leather roller skate,
uses a crutch to push himself down Main Street. Stephen’s the cynic
about to blossom into a full-fledged misanthrope; Bloom’s the romantic
who will mature into a hangdog lonely heart. Which is why Stephen’s
schemes all serve the same purpose: to bring joy to Bloom’s empty life,
to allow him to be as he wasn’t so he can be as he wishes to be, as
narrator Ricky Jay (shades of Magnolia!) announces.

When they’re boys, Stephen spins his profitable fictions to get his
brother girls; as adults, he does it to land Bloom the love of his
life. And she avails herself in the form of Penelope (Rachel Weisz),
the Jersey heiress so wealthy and bored that she collects
hobbies—among them ping-pong, rapping, playing the banjo,
breakdancing and juggling chainsaws while astride a towering unicycle.
Clearly, Penelope’s in need of an adventure, no matter how it
arrives—by hook or by crook, just someone to free her from the
confines of a dreary manse overstuffed with dusty tchotchkes.

There is a con somewhere in the movie, definitely—something to
do with a rare book ensconced in catacombs in Prague, involving men
named the Curator (Robbie Coltrane) and Diamond Dog (Maximilian Schell,
as the brothers’ Fagin). As comic relief, there’s Rinko Kikuchi as Bang
Bang, a neon-clad Harpo Marx branding all manner of destructive gadgets
from who-knows-where. And there are far-flung locales, where bright
sunlight reflects off whitecaps and mountaintops. (The Brothers
Bloom is beautiful to look at—old-fashioned escapism, a trip
around the world for the cost of a movie ticket.) But it’s best not to
fuss over the con’s sketchy details, which only serve to distract from
the real story: Bloom’s attempts to find joy in life without the
con.

Some will dismiss Johnson’s second film as just that—a
self-conscious sophomore effort filled with literary references, as the
filmmaker works to disentangle himself from constricting plot strands.
But Johnson has infused The Brothers Bloom with so much heart
and beauty that one can and should easily overlook its discomfiting
moments. Truth is, the film’s even more profound and touching upon
second viewing, once you’ve dispensed with the genre affectations and
gotten in touch with the filmmaker’s affection for his characters.
Maybe that’s the film’s best con: It steals your heart.