Movie review: Mostly good new take on the con genre in 'The Brothers Bloom'

It's mind-boggling to understand how difficult ""The Brothers Bloom"" must have been to act in or direct. It's a meta-fictional con story unlike any other. At points it could care less for the actual scam being pulled than it could for telling the story of the art of scamming.

Brothers Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrien Brody) have lived a life full of cons in which Stephen makes up elaborate narratives for Bloom to execute as they trick rich victims out of their millions. The major plot thrust of the film is their last con"" a sad job on a lonely and loony heiress (Rachel Weisz) who is so wealthy that all she can do is ""collect hobbies.""

Stephen's dream is ""the perfect con"" inventing a story that his brother can tell so well that it becomes real. This gives the acting more layers than seems sustainable at first.

Ruffalo and Brody play characters who are playing characters with stories both real and fake, and whose profession is to blur the line between the two. The actors are required to straddle the threshold between underacting and overacting, which isn't exactly narrow.

And director Rian Johnson is required to harness the perpetual anticlimax of their con to keep the movie rolling. It must have been hard, but all three pull off the cinematic heist with more than just the familiar cheap tricks of the genre.

There's a pleasing taste of the urban retro to The Brothers Bloom."" It's like a gourmet Guy Ritchie film" playing the artsy patrician to Ritchie's Cockney plebeian.

Stephen and Bloom run around in signature pork pie and bowler caps passing themselves off as antique collectors in a universe where the European and American upper classes retain the fashion sense of the inter-war years.

Johnson looks hard for the texture of the Old World in hotels bars and Belgian plazas and though it doesn't give him as much as he thinks it does it does give him a good deal. It smacks of Euro-hipsterism occasionally but mostly it rings with literary wit and intelligent humor.

Unfortunately the movie's nature of meta-fiction is artificially limiting. You can't really make a story about itself and expect it to go too far; it's a post-modern dead-end. It can provide interesting explorations of small and localized issues" but ""The Brothers Bloom"" doesn't seem too invested in these.

What it does well is re-imagine the con movie"" substituting anticlimax where the traditional ""Ocean's 11""-style flick wraps things up in a neat little bank account. And by harnessing this for it's ending as well as its start" it showcases Johnson's control as director. It's not every day someone can re-imagine a fun genre and still keep it fun.


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