This tongue-in-cheek tale of two con artist brothers (Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo) plotting to fleece a kooky heiress (Rachel Weisz) by apparently recruiting her into their team is a souffle that rises tastily in parts and sags in others.
Writer-director Rian Johnson won fans with his complex high school film noir debut, Brick. This follow-up’s plotting gets just as complicated but this time Johnson takes none of it terribly seriously, which helps a lot. Johnson is clearly a disciple of the Wes Anderson school of strained wackiness, a problem for those like this reviewer who found the likes of The Royal Tenenbaums stilted and lame, but thankfully there’s also a lightness of touch here.
The Brothers Bloom whips together a number of movie traditions, firstly reviving the simple, hedonistic charms of a semi-forgotten sub-genre of 1960s thrillers with glamorous locations and international casts, typically featuring Peter Ustinov and Melina Mercouri (which presumably explains the presence here of Maximillian Schell in a minor role). You can add to that '30s screwball comedies such as Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, and confidence trick tales like The Sting and Nine Queens.
Scattered across a number of glorious international spots, the story has the brothers setting up a ludicrously elaborate sting that will give them access to Weisz’s fortune. Trying to give away many more narrative details would not be a good idea, since the whole point of the exercise is to keep pulling the rug from beneath the viewer’s feet.
When Ruffalo’s Stephen warns his brother of their rule not to work with women, we know the pair are destined to fall in love. Of course there’s a screaming illogicality there – if they marry, he’ll have access to her money and everyone wins. But it never pays to look too closely at a film that wears its artifice and complexity so showily on it sleeve.
It’s the nature of the con film that viewers think they know what’s happening and the filmmakers are determined to be one more step ahead. The trouble is that audiences – smart ones, at least - have become familiar with this narrative style and therefore harder to trick. Johnson’s solution is to keep piling on the narrative twists so that by the end of the film we’re not really sure of what’s real and what’s part of the scam. But I ended up not caring either way.
There’s a couple of colourful supporting roles played by Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) as Ruffalo’s mute girlfriend and Robbie Coltrane as a co-conspirator. But most of what makes the film enjoyable – which is about 60% of the time - is due to Weisz. I’ve not seen the British actor do comedy before but she’s tremendously charming as a character who could have been majorly irksome. The film is stuffed with visual gags, only some of which hit the spot. When Weisz is on screen even the more contrived of these seem forgivable.
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