Starz Denver Film Festival opening night: The Bloom Brothers
Elizabeth Miller
Rian Johnson
“What’s going on here?” was the most commonly heard question from the crowd of theatergoers lined up outside the red carpet set up at the Denver Center For The Performing Arts Thursday, November 13. Photographers offered frustrated answers. It was the opening night of the 31st annual Starz Denver Film Festival, and you didn’t need to be inside a darkened theater to see a scene.
People wandered in and out of the DCPA crowd, trying desperately to catch glimpses of celebrities. Unfortunately for them, the stars at Starz are known better from their accomplishments than from their photos in the tabloids. Filmmakers like Academy Award-nominated animator Bill Plympton strutted down the runway alongside local DJ/performance artist/wackjob Magic Cyclops. From the look of it, no one could really tell why he was there. But—clad in a loud headband and blinding neon workout clothes—Cyclops got cheers out of the queue. The biggest applause, though, was saved for filmmaker (and former Coloradan) Rian Johnson, whose second film, The Brothers Bloom, opened the festival.
As the red carpet closed, gussied-up patrons hustled out of the November chill and into the majestic Ellie Caulkins Opera House, mostly filling the 2,000-seat theater. Spokespeople from the fest’s organizer, the Denver Film Society, took the stage to thank the its sponsors—but the crowd was snapped out of that tedium when a kinda-funny-but-bordering-on-obnoxious Magic Cyclops video screened. It ended with the Cyclops demanding, in his faux-British accent, “Google me!” Yeah, we’ll get right on it.
Festival director Britta Erickson of DFS then introduced Johnson, writer and director of the brilliant high-school noir film, Brick (which Starz screened in 2005). Johnson took the stage demurely, then told a brief, nostalgic story of making movies as a 9-year-old in Denver attending Dry Creek Elementary. Then he moved on to describe his new and much more highly budgeted The Brothers Bloom. As he gracefully exited the stage, the one thing he urged the audience to do while watching the film was to “laugh often and laugh loud.”
The audience complied with Johnson's humble command—although it’s a safe bet they would have laughed anyway. The Brothers Bloom takes a much lighter path than the clipped, brooding complexity of Brick, but it never loses Johnson's knack for swift, dense dialogue and creating beautifully fleshed-out tableaux that find glamour in the mundane. But most of all, this world is fun: Focusing on two con-men, Bloom is the tale of a cunning criminal mastermind (Mark Ruffalo) and his sensitive, conscience-dwelling brother, Bloom (Adrian Brody). The duo’s latest grift is a scheme aimed at milking money out of the goofy, hopeful, and often childlike Rachel Weisz. But the pleasure lies not in the plot, but in the details. Each scene of Bloom is exquisitely considered, taking risks by investing time and attention in quiet, funny little moments. At one point, Ruffalo and his explosion-fiend assistant (named, aptly enough, Bang Bang) attempt to glamorously light a telegram on fire—which, instead of burning elegantly like letters usually do in the movies, gets a bit out of hand.
But among the film’s madcap cons and country-hopping runs a meta-referential threme about the nature of storytelling, essentially asking the question: How do we write our own lives? Over the top but disarmingly sentimental, The Brothers Bloom is a completely incongruous yet satisfying followup to Brick—or at least the DFF audience seemed to think so. The packed house applauded loudly before going out into the brisk LoDo night for a little (or in some cases, probably way too much) after-partying. With 10 full days of Denver Film Fest programming to go, though, maybe they should’ve saved up a little that energy.
