The Brothers Bloom (2008) Movie Review & Film summary, Cast

The great pleasure of Rian Johnson’s debut film Brick (2005) was the way in which it imbued its overt conceit – staging film noir in a high school – with a bleary, lo-fi soul and final aura of tragedy. Johnson’s follow-up, The Brothers Bloom, displays many of the familiar traits of the sophomore bust, throwing far more into the mix than it can finally, reasonably accommodate. Which is not to say that it’s a waste of time: actually the film’s first two-thirds are a swell ride, in setting up the tale of the titular siblings, Stephen and Bloom, orphans shipped from foster home to foster home in their childhood, who finally found their true calling when Stephen engineered a scam of neighbourhood kids that also served as a way Bloom could get to know a girl he had a crush on.

They’ve grown up to be the world’s most accomplished con-men, and Stephen is still immensely satisfied with his prowess as a constructor of narratives to be lived out by his marks, where, in a fashion, “everyone gets what they want”. Bloom however is increasingly haunted by the possibility that he has no firm identity without the roles Stephen gives him, an inspecificity indicated by his apparent lack of a first name. Like his first film, The Brothers Bloom borrows the traits, trappings, and stock characters of an antique popular culture genre, and transposes them roughly into the modern world. But there’s now a far wider net cast to rake in evocations: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Damon Runyon, Eric Ambler, Ernst Lubitsch, Franz Kafka and harajuku sass all butt heads in a film that resembles an illustration of a Gogol Bordello album.

Brothers finally seems less related to Brick, however, than to other recent efforts like Martin McDonough’s In Bruges in its efforts to wield showy eccentricity and ethical query. The notion of whether life can be lived authentically without some directing script, some sense of obeying set paths and desired ends, is both meta-textually self-satirising, and also existentially relevant. Penelope, although initially seeming loopy and estranged from reality, is in truth living a life she has defined for herself in rejection of darker interpretations, and it’s the possibility that interpretation means more than incident that Johnson most cleverly presents, and most badly fails in examining. When Bloom bails on the brotherly operation after a successful scam in Berlin, fleeing to a shack in Montenegro to drink and pine, Stephen finds him after three months and nets him into a new project, which he promises will be their last: fleecing isolated, lonely, hobby-collecting heiress Penelope (Rachel Weisz) with an elaborate scam involving a phoney Belgian (Robbie Coltrane) and a black market antique book that takes them from Prague to Mexico.

But what the actually scam is, and what the outcome is intended to be, remains tantalisingly obscure. Darker elements are hinted at in the brothers’ hateful relationship with their former guru in crime “Diamond Dog” (Maximilian Schell, in a small but excellent appearance as a bandana-wearing, eye patch-sporting old sleaze), whose eye Stephen once took out, and it’s hinted both brothers’ electric hate for him is sourced in their mentor’s attempts to take advantage of young Bloom. Bloom, meantime, seems to be falling rapturously in love with Penelope, who reacts with giddy, girlish joy to a life of adventure, even coping when plans go awry and shit turns real with a supple inventiveness. Bloom, not wanting to make her a part of his sullied world, however, soon seems bent on dashing their romance and the scam. Twists ensue.

The excellence of Johnson’s cast and the crispness of his visual style help give the shenanigans a lustre of joy gliding on melancholy, particularly thanks to Brody’s restrained dourness, and Weisz’s class as an hypnotically pretty and kooky lady, with a carefully off-centre characterisation. Rinko Kikuchi is a particular blast as the brothers’ mysterious Tokyoite helpmate, Bang Bang, a wilfully eccentric anarchist who seems to have stumbled fully formed out somebody’s onanistic manga fantasy (with the inevitable joke that she rolls her eyes at someone who tries to chat her up by mentioning his fondness for anime): whether she’s dynamiting dolls to express her creativity, singing surprisingly well in a karaoke bar, throwing away an orange and eating the peeled skin, or releasing unexpected snatches of profane English, Kikuchi gives an expert comic performance that suggests a pixie-ish, Japanese Harpo Marx, even if her presence is essentially disposable.

And that’s a serious problem, coming up with figures like Bang Bang, and the rest of Johnson’s pantheon of invention on display here, all of which he doesn’t finally know what to do with. Quirk is often laid on with a trowel in a film that’s almost all set-up and then awkward resolution. The Brothers Bloom is often very funny in its early progression, particularly in flourishes like a rapid-fire montage of Penelope showing off all the ludicrous accomplishments she’s mastered over the years, gifts which suggest she could make a perfect addition for a Topkapi-esque caper that unfortunately Johnson doesn’t have the finesse to pull off. He segues instead into a last act that proves innately clumsy, unable to properly dovetail romantic drama, character crisis, melodrama and comedy in a satisfying manner. Johnson tries to sustain a disorientating tension about whether the crisis that faces the brothers in the concluding third is another scam or the intrusion of messy, vicious, no-way-out reality into their games, but the screenplay has been too lightweight to fully justify an extra dimension of disquiet.

This time around Johnson’s light gilding of tragedy doesn’t come off, partly because he leaves loose ends lying severed, and it’s all both a little too clever and not clever enough. The relationship of the Brothers Bloom themselves isn’t actually described with sufficiently convincing intimacy to make the coda more than vaguely affecting. Still, the whole project is enjoyable as a distraction, even if it’s a missed opportunity. Johnson’s comic invention is never heavy with self-satisfaction, and the film is buoyed by its lovingly-crafted look, with creative camerawork – especially a delicately brilliant camera movement that sweeps around Penelope as she delivers a telling monologue whilst performing some technically formidable card tricks – and eye-catching use of wide-angle lenses and obliquely framed shots that retain something of the abstract flavour of Brick, with the added pleasure of some very pretty Eastern European locales photographed with a candy-store palette.