Whether you like The Brothers Bloom (2008) will largely depend on your sense of humour and your tolerance for being fooled. Film maker Rian Johnson assumes you are “full of beans” like he is, and that you’ll follow the twists and turns of the caper with interest. It worked for me, but a sense of humour and a tolerance for ambiguity are highly individual.
I liked the sly sense of humour. For example, when the con artists Bloom (Adrian Brody) and his brother Stephen (Mark Raffelo) select a lonely American heiress as their last target, they get Penelope (Rachael Weicz) who “collects hobbies”—we see a montage of her playing a variety of musical instruments, spinning discs, leaping into the air for karate kicks, and so on, ending with a piece of origami that looks a bit sad. The karate and the fancy paper appear later in the movie, which to my mind makes the montage of hobbies not gratuitous but which to some people seems merely smug.
There is an intelligent “conceit” or extended metaphor that runs throughout the film: writing a life. Stephen plans his masterful cons like a Russian writer planning a sprawling novel, but Bloom is getting tired of always playing a part and wants to live an unwritten life. This raises the question of whether you can lead an unwritten life. The film does not explore this deeply because it is a fast-paced caper, but it provides a serious idea to anchor the shenanigans. It also sets up Penelope to reinterpret the metaphor in the climactic scene—what matters is who does the writing. If Bloom no longer has his brother writing roles for him, he can try to write his own life, the best story he can create. I thought the handling of the metaphor was deft, but others might see it as too smart for its own good.
The actors were so good I could relax and trust they’d pull off any scene, funny or serious or ambiguous. I enjoyed a movie that assumed I was smart enough to remember a sentence about blood made early in the movie to interpret a key scene late in the film.
The only noteworthy weakness is thatm try as I might, I cannot figure out Stephen’s motivation for his behaviour in the climax of the movie. I can guess, but the film does not give us much to go on. Still I found the entire movie a fun and entertaining romp.