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.


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

I Served the King of England (***)

Here’s something I haven’t seen before. It’s the tale of a middle-aged man and a young man, separated by 30 years. The flashback structure is the most typical thing. Stronger on visual flair than plot, it begins with the young man in a faux silent-movie segment as a small-time, small-0f-stature huckster in Prague who works his way up to a big-time waiter by absorbing the lessons of a series of mentors. The man learns well, seeming to float above everything, including a series of women who wander in and out of the story. Like other characters besides the lead, some make an impression, but most go away soon. The tone is whimsical, slightly reminding me of Amélie, but with less romantic appeal. Still, even a blowjob (implied, not seen) from a hooker seems nearly cute as light classical piano plays in the background.

The server, who dreams of money, women, and little else, is a silent witness to the decadency of the prewar era, rendered with tapestries of banknotes, vivid color, and more exotic dishes than an Iron Chef marathon. What separates the young man from his older self, besides 15 years in prison and drab surroundings, is of course the war. Typically, this would be the part in which he wises up and realizes what’s really important, but not here; he sees only that the Nazis are being treated badly by the Czechs, and sympathizes with them. This is only one of the unusual things in the movie. Probably two hours is a bit long to tell the story, and only toward the end did I lose my own mild feeling of detachment. But the choreographed, slightly unreal way the story is told and the look of the film give it an originality than may make it worthwhile for the adventurous.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/8/08