The Broth­ers Bloom

Flash back four years and Rian John­son was a name fixed firm­ly on the lips of film crit­ics and audi­ences alike. His debut fea­ture, Brick, received a rap­tur­ous recep­tion at the 2005 Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val, pick­ing up the Orig­i­nal­i­ty of Vision Spe­cial Jury Prize before going glob­al and mark­ing John­son as an indie lumi­nary with a bright future.

Today the fever­ish buzz has been reduced to a mut­ed hum. A mixed US recep­tion and post­poned UK the­atri­cal release have stacked the odds unfavourably against Johnson’s dif­fi­cult sec­ond album, but if any­thing The Broth­ers Bloom is more an anti-cli­max than a let­down. Not so much a step up as a pole vault from Johnson’s hard­boiled high school dra­ma, Broth­ers Bloom is an eccen­tric crime com­e­dy with an A‑list cast and a suit­ably inflat­ed bud­get to boot.

It’s barmy and at times bril­liant, but while John­son wears the influ­ences of post­mod­ern fairy tales like Paper Moon and The Last Pic­ture Show with pride, he ulti­mate­ly fails to recap­ture their jux­ta­po­si­tion­al charms.

Mark Ruf­fa­lo and Adrien Brody lock horns as orphaned broth­ers Stephen and Bloom, an infa­mous con man tag team who swin­dle and cheat the rich and the wealthy in inge­nious­ly com­plex set ups. Bloom is the brains of the oper­a­tion; Stephen the pawn, and he’s not entire­ly hap­py about it, per­sis­tent­ly express­ing his desire to bow out while the going’s still good. As the meek­er sib­ling, how­ev­er, Stephen is inevitably con­vinced to take on one last con – an auda­cious swiz on a clois­tered aris­to­crat with more mon­ey than sense, played with gus­to by a scat­ter­brained Rachel Weisz.

The dynam­ic of the film’s kooky core three-way is joy­ful, ten­der and engag­ing, but John­son sea­sons his script to excess, mean­ing that as a whole Broth­ers Bloom is nev­er quite realised as the sum of its parts. It may be sharply writ­ten, rich­ly tex­tured and effort­less­ly roman­tic, but as a whirl­wind round-the-world caper that goes above and beyond to toy with the audi­ences per­cep­tions of cin­e­mat­ic cliché, the upshot is exe­cut­ed far too neatly.

With so much atten­tion paid to visu­al style, nar­ra­tive idio­syn­crasies and wit­ti­er than though dia­logue, Johnson’s over ambi­tion is his film’s Achilles heel. In terms of scope and vision, the 36-year old writer/​director is still streets ahead of his con­tem­po­raries, but where the Brick class were instant­ly iden­ti­fi­able everykids in an iden­ti­fi­able envi­ron­ment, the Bloom ensem­ble are a mad bunch in a mad world. The ride may be fun, but it’s all a bit alien.

There’s enough here to sug­gest that John­son is not a one-hit-won­der kid, but for all intents and pur­pos­es his next film, Loop­er – which is cur­rent­ly in pre-pro­duc­tion, billed as a ​‘dark hit­man sci-fi thriller’ and has Joseph Gor­don-Levitt attached – can’t come quick­ly enough.