The bright, colourful Brothers Bloom might seem a strange choice to follow up a dour crime thriller like 2006's Brick, but writer-director Rian Johnson's sophomore feature has more in common with his debut than may be immediately obvious. Both films succeed on Johnson's affinity for sharp, efficient dialogue and baroque plotting, though Brick's lovable noir-pastiche of a story has been replaced here by a tale of Charade-like whimsical subterfuge. While Brothers — like Brick — struggles a little to maintain its energy in the last act, Johnson's wit and abiding affection for the literature and films that inspire him infuses the film with a kind of bright-eyed “Hollywood magic” that too often seems to have disappeared around 1969. Though barely 30 years old himself, Johnson really does make ’em like they used to.
The story is a fusion of Herman Melville, Charles Dickens and Alfred Hitchcock, skipping through the lives of the eponymous brothers (Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody) from the first confidence game they perpetrate as children, through to their “last mark” as adults in their 30s. Early on, Brody remarks that Ruffalo “plans his cons the way dead Russians plan novels, full of thematic arcs and embedded symbolism,” a line that gives Johnson carte blanche to fill his story with characters who would be more at home in the 18th century; dapper men who sleep in their three-piece suits and rich women with a myriad of esoteric talents, all of whom speak in expertly crafted monologues. By the end of the film, there are stories within stories within stories, and the wit with which Johnson connects them all and uses them to comment on one another is nothing short of dazzling. It's sad, then, that his cleverness gets an adverb-downgrade to somewhere around “sparkling” (“glimmering,” if you want to be really cruel) as the story shifts into its final act.
Again, much in the same way as his first film, Johnson shows us that he understands the needs of his plots much better than the needs of his characters. His well-woven theme of storytelling and lies reaches a very satisfying conclusion at the end of Ruffalo's last gambit, though the behaviour of everyone involved remains somewhat dubious. A fun supporting character reveals herself as little more than a roaming plot device, and even Johnson's expert photography fails to reveal the fumbling awkwardness of real life after all of the pretty fictions have been stripped away. The resolution is perfectly adequate, but after the endlessly inventive first hour and 40 minutes, its tough not to feel a little conned.
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