“Another teen movie?” Don't think Brick is filled with angsty drama, sex-crazed, over-the-top lampooning, and ridiculous stereotypes. Rather expect an old, endearing noir mystery classic and a solid thriller.
Brick, a flashy cinematic stunt by Rian Johnson, dispenses with the adolescent woes of angst, SATs, and new facial creams to graft the hard-boiled argot of Dashiell Hammett onto the modern era. You know, just without the whiskey and seedy back-alley exchanges. This is high school, after all!
The story, briefly: Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt of Third Rock from the Sun and 10 Things I Hate About You) is a loner, someone who knows all the angles and who is willing and able to take action but has chosen to stay on the outside. He gets a call from his ex Emily (Emilie de Raven of Lost) which sends his mind into a tailspin. Even though they now have nothing to do with each other, she asks for his help. When Emily turns up dead, he is determined to find who killed her and why.
Brendan plunges into the dark and dangerous social strata of our seductive femme fatale, Laura (Nora Zehetner), intimidating Tug (Noah Fleiss), drug-addled Dode (Noah Segan), a predatory drama queen, Kara (Megan Good), and the ominous Pin (Lukas Haas). Brendan's admirable gravitas, slight obsession, and undue and unexpected ability to enter the milieu of witty subversion and half-hearted truths make him a formidable underdog.
Brick is a highly ambitious independent feature that won the jury prize for "originality of vision" at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Punctuated by snippets of parody and humor, Johnson manages to preserve and yet expand the noir. The “ancient” 26 year old Pin, drug lord extraordinaire, twirls his sinister duck-crested cane like all true noir villains. Perhaps more fitting is his humorless gaze and elegant limp, suggesting a wiry, smirking Sydney Greenstreet.
But not quite... Instead of a sleek $150,000 limousine, this kingpin rides in a bright red van (appropriately decorated "n" all). Furthermore, The Pin doesn't lose an ounce of menace just because he lives with his mom, even after she comes out with a tray of freshly baked cookies to greet Brendan and his new friends.
The acting is brilliant, flawless, crisp, almost eerily so, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt sheds his prepubescent charm to reveal as much forcefulness and maturity as could be expected from Humphrey Bogart himself. Characters are played dead on, sometime slipping into wooden, almost flat, dialog, but the cast's talent is there, if latent; the producer didn't coax that bit of élan out of his actors, missing the visceral attraction and wonder consistently from the audience. Top-notch, solid performances carry the film through its drawbacks and dizzyingly complex repartee, like any other noir, full of speak-easy jargon.
Johnson expertly supplants the indie film feeling with well-placed background music and experimental cinematography. Spot on, polished, and not amateurish in any sense, Johnson keeps the audience at a cool distance, in spite of soundtrack that harkens back to the heavy style, feel and overall texture of noir films.
Brick may or may not satisfy the delicate tastes of noir aficionados. My guess, probably not, in part because placing a mystery thriller in a contemporary upscale Southern California high school, without closing the gap between oil-slick drama of the 1940s and the frisky teen actors, takes the seriousness and drama out of the noir plot. A little bit unbelievable, too, that we are dealing with teenagers, but maybe that's the point.
It does not help that Director Rian Johnson does not adapt the essence of the, by now, well-scripted genre of the 1940s any further than shooting a few scenes near lockers and by substituting the archetypical police chief with V.P., vice principal, Trueman (Richard Roundtree). On the other hand, any other ploy would have made the film seem hackneyed.
For newcomers to the noir, this film has the staying power and brute force to keep you in your seats until the very end. The storyline, complex and deliciously convoluted, unfolds slowly, purposefully confusing so that you cannot shake the intricate web of deceits until the last scene. Just don't wait for that all-encapsulating punch-in-the-gut ending, where everything is wrapped up neatly. You'll feel the air leave your diaphragm, rather because Johnson ends this feature anticlimactically-as if who committed the murder and why are unimportant. What ultimately matters, Johnson intimates, is that everyone pretends it does.
The combination of constraint and surreal tongue-and-cheek looms over Brickwith the half-sinister, half-amused smile of Mona Lisa, making it the perfect noir.
Rated R, Brick has a running time of approximately 110 minutes and was shown at Images on Thursday January 11, 2007 free of charge for Williams students.
