I had the opportunity to watch The Brothers Bloom this weekend. It’s a film that Maria and I had wanted to see for a long time but just hadn’t got around to it. To be honest, after our extended Oscar-nominated film-watching marathon we’ve both been a little burnt out on the cinema. However, if we’d realized how great The Brothers Bloom was going to be, we certainly wouldn’t have waited this long to watch it.
Unbelievably, The Brothers Bloom is only the second major motion picture from writer/director Rian Johnson. His first was Brick, a 2005 high school thriller/mystery kind of film that absolutely blew Maria and I away when we first saw it. Cast in the setting of a high school, the film has this absolutely dark, eerie and violent undertone with dialogue that just blows your socks off. The Brothers Bloom, a good old caper film, is just as impressive as Brick, and that’s saying a lot.
After seeing the film, and thinking for a while, the best way I can describe The Brothers Bloom is like this: Every scene is absolutely loving crafted.
You can tell. The detail that goes into dressing every single set, the props, the character’s costumes, the make up, the special effects—and then, the dialogue, the writing, the acting. I can’t honestly recall a film that has been so carefully and lovingly created, and that shows it so clearly. You can feel and see all the love and care and attention that was put into making this film, and I think that’s amazing.
The film itself covers a portion of the lives of two con-men, brothers named Stephen and Bloom, played by Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody. Bloom, who always seems to want to leave the business, is tired of living a written life, existing only as characters written for him to play by his brother Stephen. The film centres largely around their one final con, a hefty one, which winds up in lots of hilarious twists and turns.
At its core, The Brothers Bloom is a lot like a Wes Anderson film. It’s full of stuff that’s at times barely believable and at other times believable, but wholly surreal. I like that. Johnson creates this really intriguing environment—this world—where his characters are free to explore and invent and gives himself, as the writer, a chance to explore the idea of the narrative, and the character, and provide us with one very entertaining film. Both directs write characters so well. In The Brothers Bloom, the casting of Brody and Ruffalo was genius. They both work so well in their roles. Rachel Weisz who plays the mark in their con—and a major role in the film—acts her role convincingly leaving us never entirely certain of what she knows.
The Brothers Bloom is a great film. It’s so well made. It’s funny. It’s engaging. It’s it has a lot of stuff that you won’t expect. It’s characters are quirky and endearing and I think, on the whole, it’s a film you’d be hard pressed not to enjoy immensely. To anyone who thinks that the American art of film-making is dead, this I offer up to you.
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