Director Rian Johnson hit it out of the park with his first film Brick (2005), a small, quirky indie film with a grade-A cast and some amazing style. The Brothers Bloom looked just as good, but unfortunately had a small run and I was unable to see it in theaters.

The film centers around two brothers, Stephen and Bloom, who after being orphaned and shuffled between various foster homes, become con men to make it in the world. They’re rather good at it, but after having made a name for themselves, Bloom decides he wants out. The two brothers, along with their sidekick and explosives specialist Bang-Bang, plan the perfect con to go out on: showing a reclusive but beautiful heiress, Penelope, a good time on a  journey across the globe. Problem is, Bloom can’t con a woman without falling in love in the process.

This film’s story makes it stand out. Because it’s a movie about con men, it’s hard to know when to trust what’s going on as the absolute truth. The movie will trick you, but that’s what makes it great to watch for the first time. You’ll be guessing the brothers, especially Stephen, at every turn.

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“I think you’re constipated in your soul,” Rachel Weisz says to Adrien Brody before going into an orgasmic fit at the oncoming thunderstorm in Rian Johnson’s second film, The Brothers Bloom. That was the peak of Weisz’s eccentric and electric role as Penelope, the mark of Adrien Brody’s Bloom and Mark Ruffalo’s Stephen Bloom.

Ruffalo’s Stephen Bloom is the storyteller, the man with the set-up, writing all the key roles and setting up the players. Brody plays Bloom, (Bloom?), the heartthrob, the bait if you will, that gets the women the men con. Tired of having a scripted life setup by his brother Stephen, Bloom sets off to live “a life that is unwritten.”  Just to be lured back into one final con: to get what everyone really wants.  The mark is Weisz’s Penelope a shut-in “rich bitch from New Jersey,” as Brody says.

The con is to swindle Penelope out of her bottomless treasure trove of riches in the name of getting a priceless book, which is really mostly scrap paper. The plan is to include her in the action. Through this, Stephen the storyteller introduces us to the world that he and his brother interact with including a cast of colorful characters such as Robbie Coltrane’s farting Belgian The Curator, and Maximilian Schell’s Diamond Don, and the brother’s nitroglycerin expert Bang Bang played with Chaplin-esque silent comedy by Babel‘s Rinko Kikuchi.

That setup really is just a con to get everyone involved. The perfect con, or as Ruffalo likes to say, is “to give everyone what they want.” To give Penelope an adventure, to live a life to which all of her separate and unique abilities can be put to use, and to give his younger brother a good life with a woman he can live with.  This is literally the sole purpose of Stephen’s final con-to give everyone what they want, including himself with heart breaking results.

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