The Brothers Bloom

It's a sign of the times that The Brothers Bloom gets unceremoniously deposited in a single theater for a brief theatrical run while a heartless unfunny comedy like The Hangover makes box office dollars hand over fist. Yet that's the same story since year one of cinema. Both of the films I just mentioned to some extent represent a triumph of form over content but Bloom shows creative inventiveness in making a form that adjusts only to twist audience expectation.
The Brothers Bloom centers on the art of the con and could be on a short list of con game movies whether a couple of Mamet films or The Sting. But The Brothers Bloom actually recalls The Lady Eve with its combination of deception steeped in comic hi-jinx and for the most part pulls off the arduous task of being a witty screwball comedy.
TBB is the sophomore effort of Rian Johnson who gave us the film noir high school thriller Brick. Brothers Bloom doesn't quite come together with a worthy conclusion to what has come in the first two acts yet the overall impression is of a director to watch. Such is also the case with Richard Kelly whose Donnie Darko remains one of the best film debuts of the last twenty years only his follow-up Southland Tales found little love at the multiplex.
The Brothers Bloom stars Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody (in the movie called Stephen and Bloom) as orphaned brothers who developed their confidence schemes to overcome the emptiness in their lives due to being rejected by foster parent after foster parent. An opening flashback shows the brothers as pre-teens and even then they are hellions. There's also a one-legged kitty with an ad hoc kitty wheelchair that the feline uses to hobble by in one shot. It has nothing to do with anything else in the film yet would be perfectly in place in a Marx Brothers or even Francois Truffaut movie.
Rachel Weisz stars as Penelope Stamp an eccentric heiress and owns her screen time with a kind of lovable klutzy gusto that makes it hard for Bloom to actively con her. Costarring parts played by Robbie Coltrane and Maximilian Schell ratchet up the creep meter. Rinko Kikuchi as a soft spoken demolition expert has its own moments of levity.
Johnson likes to engage the audience in tricks and manages to make The Brothers Bloom zip by in a 60s hip fashion with its color coded heroes and enticing foreign locales.