The Brothers Bloom (2008)
Directed by Rian Johnson
The Brothers Bloom are the best con men in the world, swindling millionaires with complex scenarios of lust and intrigue. Now they've decided to take on one last job – showing a beautiful and eccentric heiress the time of her life with a romantic adventure that takes them around the world.
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3 films that influenced The Brothers Bloom
What critics say influenced The Brothers Bloom
Ever since the sublime Rushmore, director Wes Anderson’s films have arrived on a slippery scale of diminished returns, visually transcendent but emotionally vacant.
And with a sole exception (an amusing montage of one character’s increasingly outrageous hobbies which explicitly recalls Max Fischer’s list of extra-curricular activities in Rushmore), Johnson proves a poor study, importing the quirkiness, but missing the imaginative zest of his more successful model.
Johnson is clearly a disciple of the Wes Anderson school of strained wackiness, a problem for those like this reviewer who found the likes of The Royal Tenenbaums stilted and lame, but thankfully there’s also a lightness of touch here.
From the breakneck prologue which—in its flashback to a precocious childhood, its wistful narration, and its bravura editing—plays like a turbocharged version of The Royal Tenenbaums ‘s opener, to the film’s punchy, hyperreal color scheme, its narrative of sibling resentment, even its casting of Adrian Brody, Bloom seems designed to ape the Anderson sensibility, banking on a borrowed auteurist signature to cover up the lack of inspiration in its own conception.
I see the influence of Wes Anderson ("The Royal Tenenbaums," especially) in the film's offbeat tone and disconnected characters.
-- let's cut to specifics and consider " The Brothers Bloom " a hit-and-miss entertainment from 35-year-old Rian Johnson, writer and director of the 2005 indie hit " Brick ."
QUALITY Rian Johnson ( The Brothers Bloom , Looper ) made his writing and directing debut with this remarkably unique item -- an old-fashioned, stylized detective film transplanted intact to a modern high school setting.
Shooting his terrific cast against striking European backdrops, Johnson appears to be aping Wes Anderson and Hal Ashby, much as he did David Lynch in his debut Brick.
Johnson directed the smart-mouthed teen noir, “Brick,” and “Brothers Bloom” represents a leap in style – influences-wise, from Dashiell Hammett (and VH1) to Wes Anderson and mid-late 60s cinema.
The Brothers Bloom was written and directed by Rian Johnson, the stylist behind 2005’s Brick — a smart, adenoidal high-school noir in the spirit of Raymond Chandler.
Johnson’s 2005 debut, Brick, wed the familiar conventions of film noir and high-school movies to create a viable, illuminating hybrid.