Telling transcendence

The best hope for American independent cinema today is writer/director Rian Johnson. Crashing into the movie business with 2005's Brick - which he made for half a million dollars - Johnson has taken off creatively, writing an inventive and affecting script for this, his second feature film, and realizing it with brilliant directing, pitch-perfect casting and a kind of magical synchronicity in his collaboration with composer (and cousin) Nathan Johnson.

The Brothers Bloom is a heist film, a romantic comedy and heady drama all in one. The plot follows two brothers as they strive to achieve one seemingly simple thing: to tell a story so well that it becomes real. The brothers are con men, ostensibly the world's greatest, and their lives are graced with money, style and adulation.

But there is trouble in paradise. The younger of the pair, referred to simply as Bloom (Adrien Brody), is disillusioned with a life fraught with deception and unreality. His elder brother, Stephen (Mark Ruffalo), relishes the role of genius master planner, but he's at a loss to cure his kinsman's ennui. He can't hope to continue without his brother's assistance - and, furthermore, he genuinely cares about his brother's happiness - so he agrees not to insist on endlessly pursuing the business of carrying out elaborate scams.

There is a price for his acquiescence, however, and the name of the game is one last con.

Enter Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz), a beautiful, eccentric heiress who seems to be the perfect mark. With the help of their silent assistant Bang Bang (the spectacular Rinko Kikuchi), the brothers sweep Penelope off her feet and set off on a whirlwind international adventure - among other locales, there is an extensive sequence set in Prague - designed to relieve her of much of her money. However, for a supposed rube, Penelope is not without an allowance of wit, and it's difficult to say whether she is playing along for the adventure of it or if she's genuinely taken in. For the con to work, Bloom must seduce Penelope. But she pretty well seduces him, and the pair soon engage in a tentative kind of love.

With Stephen's elaborate machinations at work behind the scenes, and Penelope issuing forth with lines like, "The trick to not feeling cheated is to learn how to cheat," the true nature of the con is anyone's guess, right up to the very end. But the con isn't really the point. Johnson's film is a paean to the power of storytelling and the paradoxical nature of great art.

While discussing photography, Bloom expounds the cliché, "It's a lie that tells the truth," to which Penelope quickly responds, "I dunno about truth. A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know." They could be talking about the film itself, which bends reality, or at least probability, considerably in places, but somehow manages to be profoundly touching, evoking memories of love and loss as well as happier memories of the triumphs of imagination and passion over the banality of daily life.

Adding to the film's power is a mesmerizing original score by Nathan Johnson, who also scored Brick. The composer has managed to marry beautiful music to characters and moments with great precision (hats off to the team in charge of sound editing).

The Brothers Bloom is teeming with vivid peculiarities, but its quirkiness imbues director Johnson's characters with humanity and adds dimensionality rather than rendering the affair cartoonish. Along with the films of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic), one could argue Johnson's films are the American cinematic answer to Magical Realism in literature. Johnson has credited another American auteur of singular merit - Peter Bogdanovich - as a direct influence, citing in particular Paper Moon (1973) as inspiring him to take a fairy-tale approach to writing and directing.

But make no mistake; this is a director with vision, not an imitative hack. With the Coens whiling away recent years with soulless thrillers like No Country for Old Men (2007) and inconsequential  comedies like Burn After Reading (2008), and few if any other writer/directors out there filling the cinematic void, Johnson & Co. are a promising phenomenon. Support their efforts and see this film.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com