The Brothers Bloom
Director: Rian Johnson
Writer: Rian Johnson
Producers: Ram Bergman, James D. Stern
Stars: Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz, Rinko Kikuchi, Robbie Coltrane, Maximilian Schell
Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) is blessed with a gift, which is that he knows how to tell great stories. His younger brother Bloom (Adrien Brody) also has a gift, in that even when he consciously understands the story is a fake, he can believe it, every single time. It is difficult to think of a marriage of traits that could describe a better movie-going experience, and The Brothers Bloom, never ceasing to be a movie with all its lovingly-faked trappings, nevertheless inspires you to believe in it.
Filmmaker Rian Johnson announced himself as the new prodigy in town with 2005’s Brick, which put on the screen high school-ers that spoke and acted like characters out of The Maltese Falcon, but did so with such energy and commitment that the world he imagined achieved cohesion. In Bloom he shows that his sense for history is wider than movies; he is playing with those elements that stimulate our imagination in any story – love and exotic destinations, wealth and style, gangsters and hustlers, betrayals and noble sacrifices and ripping plot twists. When the plot turns to the smuggling of valuables, even the illicit goods have romantic backstories. What we believe is that they would not be worth stealing if they didn’t.
The brothers are con men, who took to their trade as young orphans when they hatched a scheme that both enriched them and left the wealthier and more popular kids in town bathed in mud. Stephen writes a part in the con for Bloom that involves him speaking to a pretty girl he has admired from afar – he could never do this before, but with a role to play, he shines. And the kids, ultimately and most crucially, don’t care that they were hoodwinked. Stephen is born knowing a fundamental truth – that nothing leaves the soul nourished like being part of a good story, even if it doesn’t end well for you. This is a magnificent vignette from Johnson, establishing character and tone while telling a perfectly self-contained little tale that we immediately understand is going to repeat itself as long as these two live.
As grown-ups, they are still the most accomplished of tricksters, although their epic cons involve so many accomplices you wonder what the profit margin is for them. This is missing the point of what they do. What an excellent different role for Ruffalo that he gets to be so gregarious and whimsical leading this gang. But Bloom has grown weary from all the crashing returns to reality, from his sense that he is merely an instrument in his brother’s schemes. He is so good at playing the fantasies that he has never had the chance to know what he really wants from life. It is a short list of actors who can embody that blend of weariness and fearful angst – Adrien Brody would be at the top of it.
Bloom has sworn off the life, but Stephen has sworn to draft him back into it with a scheme that involves seducing the daffy heiress Penelope (Rachel Weisz). This is an extraordinarily convoluted woman, rich and beautiful, infinitely zestful and master of all manner of strange hobbies – yet she has not dared travel far from the shelter of her great mansion. It’s almost as though she needs just one thing, or one person, to draw her out with the promise of an adventure that her wealth can finance. Bloom adores her, finds her surprising and delightful. Does he always, or is she the perfected final draft of all the earlier women?
How you feel about The Brothers Bloom depends entirely on how you feel about being played with. There are places where the “reality” of the movie must connect up with Stephen’s machinations, and on reflection you might not find those connections entirely convincing. At a certain point you must know you are being conned. It has so much wit, and so much blatant glamour – what Orson Welles referred to as “bally-hoo” when he paraded the dancing girls through his preview trailer for Citizen Kane. Like Welles, Johnson is a magician who can conceal the trick he’s springing on you but not the artifice spun around it. But inside are feelings we recognize as real – yearning and love and the kind of enthusiasm we keenly miss in our everyday lives.
Johnson is already accomplished enough in his second feature to not just build a story as a simple contraption, but assemble many wonderful little stories so they become turning gears in a greater, more elegant machine. It is designed for our delight. The characters are not so much detailed as ornamented – like “The Belgian” (Robbie Coltrane), who disappoints the brothers by proving to be legitimately Belgian, or sidekick Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi), who is along for the violence. In another movie, roles written like this would be a fatal mistake because they are so obviously figments – but here they work as an essential bet against convention for what Johnson is trying to accomplish.
From its beginning to its end, The Brothers Bloom is about storytelling, and the relationship between two men. I have heard people ask why, if only one of the brothers is named Bloom, they are always referred to as The Brothers Bloom. My theory is that Stephen knows what all real storytellers feel with such a pang deep down – that Bloom is his audience, and without an audience that believes he is nothing. His life is a gift for an audience he loves, and this movie is a gift to us.