Daffy deceptions

The Brothers Bloom is an excessively
mannered con artist comedy

CRIME ON THE CUTE: Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo

by MARK SLUTSKY

The art of the con, with its built-in reversals and dramatic reveals, charming deceptions and elaborate schemes, can be wonderful material in the hands of a capable filmmaker. After all, a good con game is about putting on a show.

Like the 1973 classic The Sting, Rian Johnson’s new film, The Brothers Bloom, seems to be heavily inspired by David W. Maurer’s The Big Con. (Maurer, a linguist, became fascinated with con artists while researching a lexicon of the criminal underworld, and his 1940 book is required reading for anyone interested in the subject.) Johnson broke through with 2005’s high school neo-noir Brick, so he’d seem like a good fit for this kind of material, but it seems to have gotten away from him here.

The Joycean-named brothers of the title, Stephen and Bloom (Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody) are a pair of lifelong con artists with a fanciful take on their chosen criminal profession. Ruffalo is the author of the cons, and he treats them more as narratives than heists, creating scenarios for his younger brother to act out in a way that seems to be strangely fulfilling for the two of them. Coming across a dizzy heiress (Rachel Weisz), they concoct a plan that takes them all over the world in order to swindle her out of her money.

Johnson seems as much inspired by Wes Anderson as Maurer here. This is a courageously (to be generous) mannered film. It’s full of cartoony background jokes, exaggerated archaisms, a mute Japanese assistant named Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi) and lots of cute old-fashioned luggage. While I’m sympathetic to this kind of stuff, I really do feel like the world of indie movies and music has just gone insane for anything evocative of the lost, old-timey aesthetics of the early 20th century and Johnson doesn’t really bring anything new to the already crowded table.

Most unforgivably, though, he skimps out on the actual con itself. The pleasures of a movie about con artistry lie largely in the design and execution of the main “job,” and here they seem second banana to the production design. The Brothers Bloom is an interesting, but ultimately frustrating (and for some, probably infuriatingly twee) effort.

THE BROTHERS BLOOM OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, MAY 29