Brick
“Brick” is exciting in its’ very originality, and inspiring in its’ conviction. As someone working on their own film, with a lot of the same qualities, it’s the right film at the right time. If you were to tell people a movie is a high school film noir, most would surely laugh at the very notion. But writer-director Rian Johnson deftly creates a universe onscreen that is at once realistic in its’ depiction of high school social dynamics and deviously tweaked to suit the conventions of noir, that most American of genres (though it was named by the French), which came to be in films like “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Big Sleep,” and has produced recent masterpieces like “L.A. Confidential” and “The Usual Suspects.” Sometimes the merging allows for moments of strange absurdity (the protagonist and heavy talk in the living room as the heavy’s mother prepares a meal for them), but you go with it because Johnson- in a terrific debut- has so convinced us of this universe, in these characters, and in this story.
At the center of it all is Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who also triumphed in last year’s underrated “Mysterious Skin”) as Brendan, a trouble-maker who got in good with the VP of his high school (Richard Roundtree, relishing his one moment onscreen) after getting in with the bad crowd, and giving them up. He’s got the street smarts for detective work, which come in handy when his estranged ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) calls him for help when she gets in too deep with the criminal element within the school, in particular a crippled drug dealer named The Pin (Lukas Haas proves a formidable presence). With the assistance of his friend The Brain (Matt O’Leary), Brendan quickly is intertwined in something deeper when Emily turns up dead, people from all sides aren’t very forthcoming with info, and Brendan has to dodge not just one but two femme fatales, the rich Laura (Nora Zehetner) and the artistic Kara (Meagan Good), who may have answers to his questions.
There’s a right way to do something like this and a wrong way- Johnson does it right. To do it wrong would be to play it as parody, to make winking nods to the noir pantheon- to not take it seriously, in other words. It’s gotta be played straight, and Johnson and his actors lay all their cards on the table here. Sometimes the elevated dialogue style borrowed from the genre can seem odd coming from the mouths of teen characters (and come on, where exactly are the police in this contemporary California town?), but you buy it because they buy it, and their personalities cater to it. Sometimes the combination of setting and situation produces odd moments like the one mentioned with the mother above, but all involved let it play out with conviction and confidence, and thanks to the mood set by cinematographer Steve Yedlin, composer Nathan Johnson, and Gordon-Levitt in a mesmerizing dramatic performance at the center of it all (he’s not Bogart, but he makes it his own), “Brick” feels as real as its’ older, adult-driven predecessors in the genre, and more original a vision than all of them. Who knew an audacious, contemporary, indie spin on an old genre would produce a modern benchmark on par with the best of its’ past? Credit Rian Johnson for having the guts and imagination to reimagine an old formula, and make it feel new again. “Brick” is one of the year’s best, and a great homage to what the masters of the genre (John Huston with “Falcon,” Howard Hawks with “Sleep,” Roman Polanski with “Chinatown,” and Curtis Hanson with “Confidential,” among others) brought to the table when they invented- and reinvented- it in the first place.
