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The Brothers Bloom
Independent Film Festival of Boston
Tonight!
7:30 pm, Somerville Theatre
[ info and tickets ]
2005 was a great year for Meta Film Noir (if such a genre exists). Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang injected new vitality into the detective story with its use of humor and not-so-subtle breakdowns of the sexual roles found in the classic films of the thirties and forties. Noir always had rich parts for women, be they femme fatales or expanded damsels in distress, but the sexual potency of the protagonist was rarely questioned. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang attacked the strength of the detective figure by contrasting Robert Downey Jr.'s neuroses (brilliantly added to the genre in Altman's The Long Goodbye) with the hilarious confidence of Val Kilmer's "Gay" Perry, homosexual PI to the stars, while also magnifying the human dimensions of the crime.
And then there was Rian Johnson's Brick, which moved the hardboiled story out of the decaying urban core and into the (sometimes) sun-drenched suburban California high school (though Joseph Gordon-Levitt's detective is careful to stand in the shadows when it isn't overcast). The recent adaptation of Revolutionary Road and the current Cheever revival attest to our continued interest in the discomforts of the suburbs, but Brick, anticipating this moment, went deeper. If Blue Velvet pointed out the depravity lying under the normal by subverting Hardy Boys plots, Brick defamiliarized relationships to the point where we can't define "normal," nor know where the breakages lie. Brick breathed the plots of Dashiell Hammett and inhaled its dialogue. It was beautifully grounded in its literary tradition.
Now Johnson is back with The Brothers Bloom, a con story starring Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody as the titular brothers and Rachel Weisz as the mark. Visually, the film is a postmodern pastiche, blending the styles of different eras. It's another way of saying that the movie looks deliberately anachronistic, or, in this case old-timey. Of course, that's something we want from Johnson; while he may not believe in adaptation (as he recently told the Herald), past works deeply inspire him, and part of the joy of Johnson's work is its referential nature.
Brody's character goes only by Bloom for most of the movie, leaving us free to speculate, to think of that famous Bloom, Leopold. Or, rather, the two Leopold Blooms: the first, of course, the "hero" of Ulysses (if such a thing can really be said to exist), constantly pulled in multiple directions; and the second, Gene Wilder's unhinged, yet hopelessly romantic accountant in The Producers: a confidence man, though not a very good one.
Two Blooms, two not-quite heroes. A perfect combination for a Wednesday night.
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