Auteur Rian Johnson: THE BROTHERS BLOOM and BRICK

I finally was able to watch Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom, and, wow, file it under cinematic-failures-only-genius-filmmakers-could-make (along with War Inc., Southland Tales, and Youth Without Youth). It's a whimsical story about two con artist brothers, Stephen (Mark Ruffalo), who writes and casts all their cons as if they were works of Russian literature, and Bloom (Adrien Brody), who has grown weary of the con artist game... of living "a fictional life."

The premise is fun, the cast is great, and the European locations are cool. I even liked a lot of the gags and found the relationship between the two brothers moving at points. Mark Ruffalo is charming; it's a fun performance where you never know if you can trust anything he says. But none of it is enough to get the movie off the ground. It all just feels like watered-down Wes Anderson. The tone and style and whimsy feel unoriginal and over-cooked. And the movie's constant "Is-everything-you're-watching-a-con?" flirtation with the audience grows tiring by movie's end. I never felt I could trust anything that was happening (I was even distrustful of the most sincere character in the movie, the puppy-dog-like Adrien Brody), which had the cumulative effect of wearing me down. By the final scenes I stopped caring.

But the movie was interesting enough to get me to finally check out Johnson's previous movie, Brick. The movie got considerable buzz and acclaim in 2005, which normally is all I need to give a movie a chance, but the premise of transplanting film noir dialogue and conventions into a high school setting kind of scared me at the time. It just seemed... potentially lame. It's hard enough for me to take teenagers seriously as is, let alone teenagers who talk like Humphrey Bogart. But throwing my reservations aside finally, I jumped in... and I was blown away. The buzz and the acclaim were completely justified -- this movie is cool!



Promising young actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays high school loner Brendan, who finds his ex-girlfriend dead and decides to investigate the case himself. As he explains to his friend and partner-in-crime, The Brain, "The bulls would gum it up" ("The bulls" being a colloquial-noir term for "the police"). "They'd flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes, probably find some yeg to pin, probably even the right one. But they'd trample the real tracks and scare the real players back into their holes. If we're doing this, I want the whole story. No cops, not for a bit." Sharp dialogue. And the movie is littered with it. Great Hammett-esque lines and exchanges. And the filmmaking and the acting sell it. You don't care that these are kids, you just get caught up in the style and the intensity of it all.

And it is intense. The stylish low-budget filmmaking, the way the camera moves, the intensity of Gordon-Levitt's performance... and those fights! Levitt's character takes and gives a lot of beatings through-out the movie, all of which are brutal and thrilling to watch.

In the end, I couldn't tell you exactly what happened, plot-wise. Labyrinthine plots are a signature of noir films, which are always more about atmosphere, style, and coolness anyway. Three things this movie has in spades.

One final note I have to say about Brick is that watching it made The Brothers Bloom all the more disappointing. I immediately wanted to see more of this writer/director's work. Something with a similar kind of intensity and originality -- but all I had was Bloom (It's odd how a director who won an "Originality of Vision" award for his first film could make such a flaccid, unoriginal-feeling second film like Bloom). I just hope Johnson's future work (IMDB says his next film is called Looper) is more in line with Brick than Bloom. I'll keep my fingers crossed.