In Theaters: The Brothers Bloom

Between his 2005 debut Brick and this week's The Brothers Bloom, filmmaker and (crack Movieline screenwriter) Rian Johnson has proven to be something of a savant with the modern crime thriller. His ear has nearly supersonic range for dialogue, and his eye effortlessly reads extra dimensions of faces and locations -- dynamics that come in quite handy with plots as complex as his. Still, however smart the source, a story is always just a story. And Bloom's most extravagant con might not be that of its swindling siblings, but rather just how touched you can be by something so weirdly inaccessible.

Shot all over the world with an Oscar-caliber cast and the winds of Brick's prodigious goodwill at its back, Bloom both contradicts and confirms certain Hollywood truths. First, to a person, creatives will insist all good cinema begins on the page. And from the top, Johnson lavishes his pages with an origin story in verse, following two ne'er-do-well orphans on their umpteenth foster family, getting the boot once more when they develop a more piercing taste for larceny. A quarter-century later, Steven (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrien Brody) are a couple of high-stakes con-artists grifting their way through Berlin. As befits his younger, more conscientious self, Bloom wants out of the game. Steven sees it coming, just as he knows he'll be back. He always is.

But it's tougher the next time, with Bloom repaired to Montenegro and Steven pleading his case for one last job in the exurban wilds of New Jersey. Their mark: Penelope (Rachel Weisz), an eccentric, self-described "epileptic photographer" with a fortune for the brothers and their mute accomplice Bang-Bang (Rinko Kikuchi) to siphon off. The protracted set up that follows keeps the principals stocked in twee: Bloom precipitates a meet-cute by riding his banana-seat Schwinn into Penelope's mistreated Lamborghini. She charms him with her "hobby collecting," including chainsaw juggling and watermelon-camera making. When they separate, smitten, she naturally follows him on a sea voyage to purported art dealings in Greece.

The con unfolds from there, if you can keep up en route to Prague, the Mexican Coast, St. Petersburg and elsewhere. Johnson's episodic visual aids ("Roping the Mark," "Setting the Bait") are borrowed from that simpler con classic of yore, The Sting, and lead to purposeful confusion over who's conning whom. Both Steven and Penelope are awfully good with a pack of cards, and if Bloom himself might be the mark, Bang-Bang sure ain't telling.

Not long before that, though, the old maxim about the page falls away, and Johnson's eye takes over. Penelope's back-story monologue, for example, resonates only as much as the long, fluid shot of the card trick she turns while delivering it. The real magic is the extraordinary Weisz herself: her speechless inability to take a compliment, or her bounding glee at joining the brothers' criminal ranks. Penelope and Bloom fall for each other sweetly, loudly, messily, and mostly accidentally, like two knocked-over jars of strawberry jam.

It really doesn't matter that Steven disapproves; by now Bloom is an exotic pastiche of locations and all the opportunities they provide. There's the pit where Bang-Bang puts on a doll-exploding demonstration, or the beach where gunfire fells a tree behind Brody's longing face. That face itself is its own location (Johnson's a witch with the close-up), as is the space between Ruffalo and Brody in their climactic confrontation.

And thank God, because another old industry adage applies quite literally to Johnson's exposition: Nobody knows anything. Or maybe they do, and maybe we do, but the trick is not to care. Without giving too much away (it's articulated on the voyage to Greece, anyway), the brothers' seven-figure ruse is as much about eternity as it is about cash. "The perfect con is the one where everyone gets what they want," the saying goes here, and do they ever.

But what audiences want is to simply feel connected to those ambitions, which has always made the con genre among the toughest in all of cinema. Indeed no film did it better than The Sting, whose complexities and charisma Johnson is wise to emulate. But knowing the vengeful purpose of those Depression-era thieves brought them closer than one ever gets to Steven or Bloom, whose motivations (aside from maybe their sartorial upkeep) and social era aren't nearly as defined.

Johnson vividly underscored each in the high-school noir of Brick, so Bloom's vacuum is all the more curious as plots and subplots overlap, knot and dissolve. There's always the argument that Johnson's con is the genre label itself -- beneath all the scams, it's just a pair of brothers, a lost woman, and the fraught love that sustains them. And that wouldn't be unfair. Still, though -- who invited the mute? RATING: 6.5