Adrien Brody's latest star turn transforms the award-winning actor into Bloom, a conflicted con man whose brother Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) persuades him to do one last grift in The Brothers Bloom. Unfortunately, the comi-tragic Bloom falls in love with the woman they're supposed to be conning, a slightly batty heiress named Penelope (Rachel Weisz) who spends her free time crashing cars, teaching herself to play a wide variety of musical instruments, and creating pinhole cameras out of watermelons. The Brothers Bloom, which was written and directed by Brick's Rian Johnson, is a globe-trotting, glamorous rom-com punctuated by explosions thanks to the brothers' sidekick Bang Bang, played by Rinko Kikuchi (Babel). It opens December 19th, 2008, in NYC and LA, and opens wide on January 16th, 2009.
Last night I was thinking, The Brothers Bloom
— why is it named The Brothers Bloom
when it's not your last name, it's your character's name? And then
I thought maybe it was a verb. The brothers
bloom.
Ahhh. That's very good. That's probably a good question for Rian
[Johnson], but maybe it's true too. Because I'm also referred to as
Bloom, which would mean, what, my [name is] Bloom Bloom? Bloom is
blooming? It's a verb.
Did that occur to you?
No. [laughs] It's awesome... It's great, actually. I like
that.
Can you compare and contrast the relationship Bloom has
with his brother Stephen to The Darjeeling Limited
brothers?
I think there are some similarities, in some respect. Obviously,
there's the older brother syndrome going on where there's a bit of
overshadowing going on by the older brothers. But the real issue
for Bloom is that he's an orphan, and he really had no father
figure, and the only influences he really had were probably through
Stephen and being thrust into these concocted characters. And I
think that caused problems for him, because he was probably very
uncomfortable dealing with the real world and that was a crutch for
him, but once the stories ended and the cons were over, he didn't
know who he was. And in a sense, that's the struggle for the three
brothers in that other film — they've lost their
father and now they're trying to come to terms with who they are.
They're all kind of having a crisis. But Bloom is far more tragic,
and he's a much less fortunate human being, and the wonderful thing
in Bloom is that he finds that redemption in Penelope and finds
this girl [who] is almost the anti-Bloom, who is this self-made
[person], full of enthusiasm yet also sheltered in her own way, and
the two of them unite and [are] kind of perfect for each other,
even though they're almost opposites.
