Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the 2008 caper-comedy drama, "The Brothers Bloom."

It was written and directed by Rian Johnson.

"The Brothers Bloom" stars Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, and Mark Ruffalo, with Rinko Kikuchi, Maximilian Schell, and Robbie Coltrane.

Stephen Bloom and his younger brother, Bloom Bloom, are orphaned at an early age.

The two were taken into, and evicted from 38 different foster homes in rapid succession.

Each time, because of some deliberate act of mischief by Stephen, aided and abetted by his younger brother.

In the process, they become perpetual outsiders who have only each other to rely on.

When Stephen is 13 and Bloom is 10, they wind up at what Stephen calls a one hat town, where Bloom longs to become friends with the local children.

He has a crush on one girl in particular, but he's too shy to say anything to her.

Steven decides to create a role for his brother to play to help him fit in with the other kids, a role that will also allow Steven to pull off the first in a long series of elaborate con jobs.

Some 25 years later, the brothers have a successful career as con artists with the help of different accomplices, the most enduring of whom is Bang Bang, a beautiful woman who is Steven's mistress, as well as a demolition expert.

After a celebration of yet another successful con, Bloom tells Steven he wants a different kind of life, an unwritten life, that would allow him to discover who he really is and what he really wants, apart from his brother's elaborate con games.

Bloom tells Steven he plans to disappear where Steven can't find him.

But three months later, Steven tracks Bloom down in Montenegro.

He persuades Bloom to join him for one final con that will set them up for life.

The plan is, the two of them will present themselves as antique dealers to swindle Penelope Stamp an exorbitantly wealthy, but socially isolated heiress, who lives alone in the largest mansion in New Jersey.

Steven's ambition is to pull off the perfect con game.

As he says, "The perfect con is one where everyone involved gets just what they wanted."

The confidence trick or scheme is a specific form of criminal theft.

The con artist first works to gain the confidence and trust of their victim or mark, and then uses that trust to defraud them.

To do this, the con artist draws on many of the same skills that are employed for more benevolent ends by the salesman, the politician, the actor, the magician, and the lover.

Back in 1923, one con artist, Edward H. Smith, wrote "Confessions of a Confidence Man: A Handbook for Suckers."

The title gives you some idea of what Smith thought of his marks.

In the book, Smith listed the six definite steps or stages of growth of a con game.

Among the steps are foundation work, the con artist's preparation for the scheme, the approach and the buildup, connecting with the mark, and initiating the process of defrauding them, the payoff or convincer, that bates the hook by giving the mark a little taste of success at the early stages of the scheme, and the hurrah, a sudden manufactured crisis that forces the victim to make a quick decision, invariably the wrong one.

Although there are many different classic confidence schemes from the pig in a poke to the Spanish prisoner, they all more or less followed the same pattern, leaving the mark gulled, and the con artist free to begin the process all over again with a new mark.

However much we may disapprove of those who take advantage of the greed or gullibility of other people in real life, the men or women who can successfully execute a confidence game seems to be a subject of perpetual fascination for storytellers.

Part of the interest con artists provoke among outsiders is a matter of simple curiosity, why and how do people with such a thorough knowledge of human psychology use that knowledge for their own gain.

Another part of what intrigues audiences is watching from a safe distance, how the intricate machinery of a con game works to bring about the desired conclusion.

Then there is the simple appeal of being in the know about the con artist's secret intentions, while the mark remains blissfully unaware.

Just as we love to discover how a magician pulls off a skillful illusion, in movies, we love to see how the con artist fools their mark, at least until we, the audience, find out that we may have been fooled as well.

Rian Johnson, the screenwriter and director of "The Brothers Bloom," was born in Silver Springs, Maryland in 1973 and grew up in Denver and San Clemente, California.

He decided to become a director after seeing Woody Allen's 1977 movie "Annie Hall," and studied film at the University of Southern California.

As "The Brothers Bloom" demonstrates, his writing and his directorial and visual style have been definitively shaped by the work of other filmmakers.

The origin of "The Brothers Bloom" was Johnson's fascination with the idea of storytelling.

He told an interviewer at the film's release, "I was giving a lot of thought to storytelling and how storytelling is a part of our everyday lives, and if you're going to talk about storytelling, it seems that the most exciting way to do that is to use the conman.

This sense of theater that the con artist is creating and the reality that he's creating in order to bilk his mark."

Johnson was influenced by such classic con game movies as "The Sting" from 1973 and "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" from 1988, but also Martin Scorsese's 1978 concert film "The Last Waltz," and James Joyce' 1922 novel "Ulysses," but Johnson gave primary inspirational credit to a 1973 movie by Peter Bogdanovich.

"'Paper Moon' was really the first thing I watched that took more of a fairytale approach and was more relationship based," he said.

As for other influences, he suggested, "Take your pick."

Johnson deliberately imbued "The Brothers Bloom" with an elevated style that encompassed costume and production design, as well as the heightened eccentricity of its characters.

The two brothers' attire, for example, is suggestive of an earlier time, as are the settings in Belgrade, Prague, and other locations in Romania, Greece, and Montenegro, as well as aboard the steam yacht SS Delphine.

Explaining his style, Johnson said, "Where that came from is just wanting to give the audience the sense that we were from Bloom's perspective.

Trapped inside the story that Steven was writing.

This whole world is being created as he's scribbling in his notebooks.

It's wild, and it's nuts, and in a way that was done to kind of make you feel like Bloom.

That we can kind of thirst like Bloom for everything to calm down a little."

Probably the most eccentric character in "The Brothers Bloom" is their mark, the heiress Penelope Stamp played by Rachel Weisz.

Johnson said the part of Penelope was the hardest for him to write because he wanted her character to be more than just the sum of her myriad quirks.

Penelope at one point tells Bloom, "I collect hobbies."

Hobbies, Weisz as Penelope, briefly shows off to Adrian Brody as Bloom.

Weisz told "New York Magazine," "I had two weeks to learn to play piano, violin, accordion, and break dance, to juggle, do karate, play ping pong, banjo, unicycle, and even skateboard."

A skill Brody helped her to learn.

But he was not enthusiastic about one of Weisz's other newly acquired skills.

"Adrian is really into hip hop," she said.

"I had to rap a classic and he was so ashamed.

The look on his face was like I was dissing his whole culture."

As it turned out, the most difficult skill for Weisz to learn was the card trick that demanded daily practice for over a month before she could master it.

That scene required a dozen takes, but the final continuous unenhanced shot proved Weisz's genuine dexterity with the cards.

Johnson suggested there was an upside to all the hard work Weisz had done.

"If she ever got tired of acting," he said, "she's learned to juggle.

She can make a living entertaining at birthday parties."

The critical response to "The Brothers Bloom" was mixed.

Some critics celebrated what Claudia Puig in "USA Today" called, "Its offbeat perspective and magical realism style that works exquisitely," but the majority thought the movie was too mannered in approach and too proud of its own eccentricities.

Robert Abele wrote in a review on "The Los Angeles Times," "Johnson is so in thrall of filmmaking quirks that if he's not distracting us himself, he's enlisting his actors.

He has Weisz juggling chainsaws and writhing orgasmically to thunderstorms."

But he added, "The irony is that outside of the manufactured oddities, Weisz's performance is the best thing in the movie.

An old school screwball turn of hyper curious pep."

But some felt the movie's virtues outweighed its defects.

Robert Wilonsky in "The Village Voice" said Johnson had "infused 'The Brothers Bloom' with so much heart and beauty that one can and should easily overlook its discomforting moments."

He even ventured that a second viewing would reveal the film as "even more profound and touching."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.