Adrien Brody, left, Rachel Weisz and Mark Ruffalo star in Rian Johnson's romantic crime comedy The Brothers Bloom. (TIFF)

This article originally ran during the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.

There’s a lot of legerdemain going on in The Brothers Bloom. The high-spirited romantic crime comedy stars Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo as a pair of sibling con men and Rachel Weisz as their mark, a kooky heiress. Written and directed by tyro Rian Johnson (Brick), the picture is sprinkled with all kinds of literary and cinematic references: to James Joyce and Herman Melville, to The Fortune and The Sting, to the Marx Brothers and the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges.

'I'm already a con man by virtue of my profession.'

—Actor Mark Ruffalo

Just don’t ask Weisz about them. Settling down for a round-table interview with journalists during the Toronto International Film Festival, the British-born Oscar winner is caught off-guard when a well-read reporter wants to know why the film alludes to Joyce’s Ulysses.

“You know what? I don’t know,” she admits candidly. “Rian is really literary and very, very smart. I honestly never asked him that question. When you’re going to play a character, that stuff doesn’t help you.”

She’s right, of course. Leave the in-jokes to the critics, who’ll savour the fact that Brody and Ruffalo’s characters are named Bloom and Stephen (after the two principal male figures in Joyce’s Homeric novel) and that Weisz’s heiress is called Penelope (as in the wife of the original Ulysses in Homer’s The Odyssey). In the course of the film, the three set out on a meandering odyssey of their own, guided by Ruffalo’s Stephen, who spins out his confidence tricks as elaborate storylines.

You don’t need to catch those allusions to enjoy Weisz’s delightfully daffy performance. Her character, Penelope Stamp, is a reclusive eccentric who lives alone in a palatial New Jersey mansion and spends her time busily acquiring a raft of hobbies – from skateboarding to juggling chainsaws. That is, when she isn’t habitually crashing her yellow Lamborghini. It’s quite a departure for the actress, who nabbed an Academy Award for portraying a fearless activist in the film adaptation of John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener.

Bloom (Adrien Brody, left) and Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) are a pair of sibling con artists preparing to pull off one last big scam. (TIFF)

“Penelope was a character that I just couldn’t pass up,” says Weisz, looking demure in a navy-blue dress. “I really wanted to play her.” Apart from putting on an American accent — something she says she’s already acquired from living in New York with her partner, director Darren Aronofsky — Weisz didn’t need a different skill-set to act the quirky role. “The aim, in drama or comedy, for me, is to be naturalistic,” she says. “There really isn’t any difference, because Penelope doesn’t think she’s being funny. I was just being completely serious. It’s the situations she’s in and who she is that are kind of off-the-wall.”

In fact, all three leads in The Brothers Bloom are actors better known for their dramatic chops. Brody won his Oscar for playing a Holocaust survivor in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and Ruffalo’s sombre resume includes Zodiac, Reservation Road and the new Fernando Meirelles drama, Blindness, also screening at this year’s festival.

Nonetheless, the two men had no problem getting into their roles as the offbeat Blooms, who dress like turn-of-the-century European immigrants and travel the world pulling off intricate scams. “I grew up in New York,” says a bearded Brody, “and New York is full of con men, literally. I’ve been conned and you learn from that, too. You learn how convincing they can be.”

“I’m already a con man by virtue of my profession,” jokes an affable Ruffalo, but says he did feel an affinity with the brothers. “These guys are really actors. It’s very similar to our lives — you’re living on the road, you’re kind of living out of a suitcase. They have this kind of threadbare elegance to them. That’s kind of what it’s like being an actor. You’re kind of selling something. Like here I am right now, hawking this movie.”

It’s an easy sell. The film reels you in right from the whimsical introduction, narrated by magician Ricky Jay, which recounts the brothers’ errant childhood and the start of their crooked career. Fast forward a few decades to find Stephen and Bloom, now big-time swindlers, embarking on one last, great scheme. Crafty Stephen has cooked up a ploy to bilk Penelope out of her millions, but the melancholy Bloom, tired of the con racket, finds himself unexpectedly falling for her. Penelope, meanwhile, believes the brothers are smugglers and eagerly joins them and their (literally) silent partner, a Japanese explosives expert named Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi of Babel), in a plot to steal a rare book from a Prague museum.

What follows is a feast of silliness, from Penelope’s slapstick efforts at robbery and Bang Bang’s penchant for blowing up Barbie dolls to hammy cameos by Maximilian Schell as the brother’s scruffy, one-eyed mentor and Robbie Coltrane as a Belgian scam artist (with an accent thicker than Hercule Poirot’s). The larky tone turns out to be a set-up, though, as the plot starts to take some unexpected — and not always successful — turns.

That’s one of filmmaker Johnson’s sleights of hand. Just as his 2006 debut, Brick, transplanted a Dashiell Hammett-style, noir thriller to a California high school, The Brothers Bloom tries to put one over on the classic con-man comedy.

The Brothers Bloom is the sophomore effort from director Rian Johnson (Brick). (TIFF)

“I wanted to do a con-man love story,” explains Johnson, a blond man with a round face who is as engaging as his films. “[The con-man movie is] a genre where the audience is trained coming into it to not trust, and thus not emotionally invest, in anyone. That’s what got me excited about [this idea]: Can you do a love story, where at the end the big twist is not a ‘Gotcha!’ but an emotional payoff?”

Johnson can identify with con men, too. The 35-year-old Orange County native made a huge leap going from Brick, shot with little-known actors on a $500,000 budget at his own San Clemente high school, to Bloom, which cost $20 million, was filmed on location around Central Europe, and boasts an all-star cast. “Coming into this [movie], frankly, there was a big part of me that was terrified,” Johnson confesses. “What was fun about it was that I realized that’s also what the movie is about: faking it.”

He’s done a pretty good job. The Brothers Bloom doesn’t pull off all its tricks, but it’s clearly the work of a smart young director with a real sense of style. Johnson was also lucky to have such an expert cast. And if he gave Weisz a rare opportunity to show her zany side, she taught him a few things about filmmaking in return.

A meticulous director, Johnson says he arrived on the set each day with storyboards and flow charts, already certain of how he wanted to shoot each scene. “I was kind of like Bloom or Stephen, but then Rachel was very much like Penelope. She would automatically start with, ‘Oh, but what about this?’ and ‘What about that?’ She’d be this whirlwind of energy and I’m like, ‘But I have my little flow chart!’” he says with a laugh.

“For me, it was a real learning and growing experience,” Johnson continues. “I got to really take joy in all that stuff being messed up, which I think, at the end of the day, is going to bring any movie to life. One of the things I feel like I really learned from Rachel’s style of approaching the work is the importance of play.”

The Brothers Bloom opens May 22.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.