Partners in Crime

natebell — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:27:14 -0700

The Brothers Bloom, a conman comedy by Rian Johnson, is a film eager to be liked, and as such seems fated to have the opposite effect. “Quirky” is too complimentary an adjective for the film’s cloying brand of humor, which seems borrowed, lifted, or flat out filched from sources as various as Jean-Pierre Melville and Frank Oz. Johnson, whose second film this is, seems to relish trying out new ideas, but he tries too hard to curry favor with his audience—the entire movie can be reduced to a formula: adorable stars (Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rinko Kikuchi) wearing cute costumes posing in front of postcard-pretty backdrops. (Shot in Serbia, Romania, and the Czech Republic, Bloom certainly looks attractive.)

Johnson’s debut, Brick, which I admired when it came out, was so outlandishly conceived that it succeeded as a fantasy. The world it created (that of the high school noir) allowed for a certain degree of artifice—the high style cocooned it, cut it off from the real world. But Bloom, which takes place somewhere resembling the planet Earth, is intrusively artificial. In Brick you have high-schoolers behaving like adults; in Bloom, all the adults behave like children. Must all sophomore efforts be so sophomoric?