ABBA NETWORK

The Brothers Bloom was written and directed by Rian Johnson, the stylist behind 2005’s Brick - a smart, adenoidal high-school noir in the spirit of Raymond Chandler. He obviously likes to toy with classic movies, now bringing his geek’s love of film and formalism to the con-man buddy genre (a la The Sting) and crafty House of Games-manship.

The effect is undeniably self-conscious - mannered, even - but it stops just short of metafiction. Bloom doesn’t break the fourth wall. He doesn’t know he’s a character in a movie, just a character in one of his brother’s thickly plotted schemes. “He writes his cons the way dead Russians write novels,” he muses at the outset. But the existential sadness in Bloom, captured in Brody’s bone-weary performance, hits the viewer with an extra shudder of irony. Poor lunk - he has no idea how bad he has it. He isn’t even real.

Emotionally, The Brothers Bloom hasn’t a trace of detachment or cynicism.

Even if you don’t quite comprehend the ending (there seems to be 12 of them), you’ll still feel the wallop of its consequences. Weisz still makes a radiantly oblivious woman-child. And Ruffalo invests his role, as always, with a shaggy masculine warmth that generates instant and inexorable sympathy.