From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

In just two films, Brick and his newest, The Brothers Bloom, writer-director Ryan Johnson,

as master away to keep both his heroes and the audience slightly in the dark.

So let's turn a little flashlight on there.

Ryan, first of all, thanks for coming back.

Thanks for having me back.

Well, also we've got a film here.

It's got a little bit of, I guess, con man stuff, a little Bergman, a little, oh, I don't know, a little bit

of everything in it, doesn't it? I'm glad to hear you put it that way, because I always feel

like I'm copping out when people ask me what kind of movie it is, and I start basically listing

eight different genres. I think it's primarily a con man movie, you know. That was kind of the starting point for it was to take a crack at doing a kind of a unique take on the con man genre, I guess.

It's also a really different look than was Brick.

And this one is, well, first of all, it's about family.

And there was kind of an ad hoc family, an incredibly ad hoc dysfunctional family in Brick. But this is a literal family here.

Yeah, it's about two brothers who are con men. And that's Adrian Brody and Mark Ruffalo played the brothers. It's their relationship. And it's, I'm always nervous when I put that when I say this is like the central dynamic in the movie because it's something that we've seen done plenty of times before.

But it's basically them pulling their last con on this woman who's played by Rachel Weiss.

And it's about how she comes into it and it kind of everything goes wrong.

But I promise it goes wrong in a way that you haven't completely seen before.

I would agree with that.

But I think also one of the things that goes on, it's really about that family dynamic.

And it really did feel like I was watching in some ways a Bergman movie,

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