The Brothers Bloom

Richie and Margot hug themselves inside Richie's yellow sleepover tent, trying to be small. She traces round and round remembered grooves on a vinyl anodyne. She asks him how many stitches he got and he shows her. They do the accounting. A fall from the monkey bars equals two stitches. How far did you fall? She regards the sleeping bag they once secreted into a museum, to be on their own but safe, to wonder in safety at the contents of the world — the distant condition of childhood. I think of the mixed-up files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler (given to me and me alone by my crush, my teacher, third grade), or maybe Holden Caulfield and his little sister at the zoo, or, now, the last scene in the Squid and the Whale, beholding terrible monsters in their frozen taxidermy, understanding that such things be real... Margot at the flap. Somehow I think also of the end of On the Road and the final unheard shout of Dean Moriarty receding out of experience and into remembrance; a reunion turned final part, unresolved. Nothing to be done about it now. "I think we're just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that, Richie."

The brothers Stephen and Bloom are about the Tenenbaum family business: ostensible adults replaying, reenacting and renegotiating the dramas and traumas of the child. The gamechanging difference is that Stephen is a Great Man. He is capable of shaping destinies and resolving what others cannot. We call that charisma. Wes Anderson is fonder of less effectual men and fools — the residents and guests of 111 Archer Avenue remain mostly subject to circumstance — but two of Anderson's characters are known to bear a touch of greatness, when each gathers himself: Max Fischer and Mr Fox.

Stephen is like Max Fischer well tutored by Harry Lime.

And thus the energy that electrifies Rian Johnson's film, that bursts the title BROTHERS BLOOM into showbiz light, that gives lively meter to the poetry of image and supplies ebullient throwaway decor, is channeled direct from Stephen's certitude in the power of his fiction; the confidence of the con man. To lie is to reshape the world.

Another book I read around third grade, one of the few from that time I still keep with me, is The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald. It is the story of two brothers, a brilliant ten-year-old con artist and his admiring younger, growing up in Mormon Utah in the 1890s (from whence the young Stephen and Bloom, given their anachronistic dress, might well have issued). Call it the further adventures of Tom Sawyer; Gilded Age hucksterism with a Sears Roebuck catalog as the prankster's bible. Stephen's businesslike philosophy, and the Great Brain would quite agree, is that "the perfect con is one where everyone involved gets just what they wanted." Every scheme, then, is a whitewashed fence. These boys, destined to be great men or great fools, nothing less, are of a familiar and favorite type: the youthful trickster, the merry liar, the brash altar boys at the church of America's patron saint, Old Scratch... Tom Sawyer is an orphan, as are the Brothers Bloom; the Great Brain (also name of Tom) is blessed with freckles bestowed by neither his mother or father. You can guess at the secret parentage and benefactor of each.

Credit where credit is due. Writer-director Johnson is as exciting right now as Anderson was nine years ago. Both are in love with old movies (Anderson's Francophilia in particular is ever more prominent) but whereas Anderson gives nod to his influences with the occasional trinket homage, otherwise nurturing his own signature picturebook visual style, Johnson is a true classicist in the dramatic flair of his staging and lighting — old Hollywood glamour reinvigorated by indie spirit. Consider one of my favorite shots. Aboard the much refined steamer Fidele at evening the camera pans from the parlor to the dining deck, gliding past a decorative microdrama that plays out in the foreground: An unnamed man leans in for a romantic kiss, the unnamed woman turns her head away in disdain. An entire story in a moment, placed solely for atmosphere, and the camera glides on. It is Johnson's confidence as a filmmaker that is on loan to Stephen, his bold invention.

I've said on record that film noir is probably the most difficult genre for a director to get right. The Brothers Bloom is Johnson's second feature film. His first was Brick (2005), one of the most original pictures of the decade and among the best works of all modern noir. Johnson's masterful conceit was to set a classic, mean, hardboiled detective noir in a contemporary California high school, mapping all the character types from one realm to the other. It's like one of Fischer's plays, except not cute. And that's the further genius of it — it's the complement to Anderson: ostensible children playing adult roles attended by dead sincerity and all due gravity. And so on we negotiate our place.