The Brothers Bloom (**1/2)

The greatest trick in any film about con artists is to get the audience to buy the tale. Alas, in writer Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Brick, they may not. That the brothers are played by non-lookalikes Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo doesn’t help; nor do they look like the child actors in the opening sequence. But that’s not a big deal. More significant is that in that sequence the two boys look like bowler-hat-wearing twits, and their elementary-school swindle is not rendered convincingly. The first scene with the adult brothers—still conning—is rendered in such a stagy fashion that I expected the camera to pull back and reveal that Brody and Ruffalo had become actors in a play.

I liked the movie somewhat better once I got used to its rhythm. There are two other members of the brothers’ team. Rinko Kikuchi (Babel), as their mysterious, nearly mute Japanese explosives expert, is equal parts cute and coy, even if her role is contrived. And Rachel Weicz does well enough with the character—the wealthy mark—who actually has the most dimensions. She’s supposedly an expert in, among other things, several musical instruments, a martial art or two, juggling, and unicycling, and speaks multiple languages. Except for the last, she doesn’t get to use any of these abilities. Now why have such a character and not use that? Of course, her primary function is to pair up with Bloom, the brother played by Brody, but if you don’t figure that out immediately you may have never seen a movie.

So the usual questions get raised. Will Bloom choose love or money? Will his brother Stephen the supposed genius of the operation, let him decide? And what is real and what’s just a con? All of the ingredients of the classic caper film, but The Sting it’s not. Johnson can evoke a style, but it never feels very organic. I thought the same thing about Brick, in which high schoolers used 1930s detective-novel slang, although plenty of people seemed impressed. Here, Johnson has Stephen drawing elaborate diagrams and using Herman Melville novels (no, not Moby Dick) as inspiration for his con jobs, but they never seem as clever as they’re supposed to. It would also have been nice if the grand finale, in which all of the themes (finally) come together with more action than the rest of the movie, had actually been comprehensible. Stephen says, in the movie’s best line, that the best cons are the one that leave everyone feeling they got what they want. And if you want to give the audience what it wants, you need to let them feel like they’re in on the action.


IMDB link

viewed 6/6/09 at Tilton 9 and reviewed 6/7/09