The Brothers Bloom

A smug and insouciant little caper of a movie, The Brothers Bloom should only be indulged in once. There are so many parts of the movie that works, we can almost forgive its utter lack of substance.

The Brothers Bloom revolves around Bloom (a morose and sensitive Adrien Brody) and his older non-brother, Stephen (a rakish Mark Ruffalo). As the best con men in the world, they happily deprive wealthy women and children of their easily earned cash. Stephen revels in the life of a crook, but Bloom is deeply unsatisfied with his melancholy escapades and prefers a more subdued life of sipping wine on a small Mediterranean island. Stephen gets Bloom to agree to one last con, in which Bloom seduces the wealthy heiress Penelope Stamp (a delighful Rachel Weisz), who never goes out of her New Jersey mansion except to wreck canary-colored Lamborghinis. In place of social skills, Penelope enjoys a variety of psycho hobbies, many too strange to be mentioned here (no one would believe me anyway).

The wackiness of the movie works quite well for the most part. We get a carefully crafted joining of sophistication and quirk, with Bloom and Stephen dressing in three piece pin-striped suits, suspenders, and Mediterranean sailing outfits of pure white (the costume design is by far my favorite part of the movie). Penelope is wonderfully naive yet wickedly fun, and sidekick Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi) manages to entertain with a three word vocabulary (perhaps because she enjoys placing explosives in Barbie dolls and blowing them up). Although I'm generally not a fan of Mark Ruffalo, he shows some promise here as the mastermind and caring older brother. The show-stealer is Adrien Brody, a sad puppy-dog eyed Adrien Brody (I realize that he looks like this in every movie) who is destined to forever be a character and shadow in Stephen's script.

By now you're probably wondering what is actually wrong with this movie. The plot falls un-deliciously flat in the last forty minutes, after being just passable in the beginning. This movie trips in its own perceived cleverness, and the conceit becomes increasingly more annoying by the minute. Although told to expect the ultimate con, we get a pasty and somewhat flat whimper at the end. One wishes that the director would pay less attention to the cinematography and acting and focus instead on the meat and potatoes (I can't believe I just wrote that). No doubt buoyed by a crumbling storyline, the pace is severely erratic, which would be forgivable if it weren't so interminably slow at times...such a drag. The Brothers Bloom had clearly been made with love and care, but its mild ingenuity only highlights how good it could ultimately have been.