Rian Johnson’s comedy about a pair of brilliant Jewish con artists with one last great scam up their sleeves is a charming fairytale about fiction itself. Mark Ruffalo’s elaborate stings are so beautifully conceived that it is difficult to know where real life ends and make-believe begins. Stephen (Ruffalo) maps out every crooked scenario like a romantic story. He paints the exotic scenery – St Petersburg, Prague, New Jersey, Mexico, Montenegro – and fleshes out the elegant parts that each brother plays to psychological perfection.

In one of the first scenes we see his 35-year-old younger brother, Bloom (played by Adrien Brody), taking a fake bullet in the chest from an emotional “mark” (victim) who doesn’t realise just how neatly he has been set up. The irony is that Bloom feels imprisoned by Stephen’s ingenious deceptions. His personality feels as if it is a figment of his brother’s imagination. Bloom aches for the uncertain freedom of “an unwritten life” – a future that hasn’t been scripted by his witty, flamboyant brother. The existential comedy lies in just how impossible this is for Brody’s fearful hero. No matter where he runs, he cannot escape his genial brother or their mute oriental sidekick, Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi), whose fondness for nitroglycerine punctuates the story. Read the rest of this entry »

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