The Brothers Bloom.

I saw bits of The Brothers Bloom on the flight back from Arizona in October – and when I say “saw,” I mean that in a literal sense, as I didn’t put on headphones – and was interested enough to add it to our Netflix queue, but promptly forgot to do so. Seeing the title on a ten-best-films-of-2009 list (CNN’s, I believe) two weeks ago reminded me, and it was right up my alley.

The Brothers Bloom had a number of things working in its favor before I even pressed play. I love movies or books about con men – it doesn’t get much better than The Sting, despite the movie’s massive musical anachronism, and many of the hard-boiled detective novels I read are built around cons of one sort or another. It alludes to a number of literary works I’ve read – including, as you might guess, the one I’m struggling through reading right now. (And that is a major reason I’m reading Ulysses; without that experience, I often feel like I’m ignorant of a secret language that later authors used in their works.) It’s filmed all over Europe. It stars Adrien Brody, who I thought very much deserved his Oscar for The Pianist. (Or, one might argue, he deserved what he took along with the award.) It’s witty. And it has heart without excessive sentimentality.

The Brothers, Stephen (older) and Bloom (younger), are passed from foster home to foster home as children, earning their tickets out of each home for one sort of mischief or another, a pattern that culminates in a con that launches them on a roughly twenty-year spree of defrauding wealthy people as a way of life. Bloom, whose first name is never revealed, is always telling Stephen he wants out of the racket, but can’t commit to such a decision. When they pull what is to be Bloom’s “final” con, on wealthy, beautiful loner Penelope Stamp, Bloom falls in love with the mark while she finds the excitement her life has always lacked. Oh, and their Japanese sidekick, known as Bang Bang, never speaks but is a wizard with explosives.

Rachel Weisz ends up stealing much of the show in her role as Penelope as she manages to produce a fairly compelling display of social awkwardness and low self-confidence. Her effusive celebration when she pulls off, against all odds, her part in their biggest con, has an endearingly nerdy quality to it – she can’t believe she did it, and her celebration lacks the self-restraint of someone more conscious of how she looks to others around her. Brody’s performance was as strong, but the weakness and passivity of his character blended him into the background more than you’d expect for an actor of his caliber. Mark Ruffalo, as Stephen, oozes with confidence in a role that calls for a little overacting. Rinko Kikuchi says three more words as Bang Bang than she did in Babel, although she looks great throughout the film.

The richness and pace of the script were what made the movie work for me, even more than the performances or the con man angle. Everything is quick, quick cuts, short scenes, and no drawn-out monologues or lingering tension until the movie’s final sequence; it’s a hard-boiled movie, right down to the bantering among the characters and the remorselessness of the head fraudster. Writer Rian Johnson must be a fan of classic literature, from the overt reference to Herman Melville’s final novel, The Confidence Man, to the names Stephen (Dedalus) and (Leopold) Bloom (the two main characters in Ulysses) to Robbie “Hagrid” Coltrane’s stint as a Belgian man who pays far too much attention to his thick mustache (a nod to M. Poirot, I presume), which I admit is a cheap and easy way to win points with me. I haven’t seen anything of Johnson’s before, but I see he made a hard-boiled detective film in 2005 called Brick; if any of you have seen it, I’d like to hear your thoughts.

The Brothers Bloom did fall short in one regard – the path to the climax, where Bloom is forced by the script to make some, in my opinion, unrealistic choices, leading to an unrealistic (but poetic) choice by Stephen. Bloom’s desire to keep Penelope out of the con game is much more easily solved by him leaving the con game than by what ultimately unfolds, but having him simply walk away would have eliminated the slam-bang finish, where only Bang Bang’s exit is truly clever or memorable. It’s a forgivable flaw given the strength of the first 90 minutes, but I am, as always, a sucker for movies with a little heart.