By D. W. O'Dell
Brick (2005)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas
The central concept of Brick
is pure genius. Describe hardboiled detective Sam Spade: cynical,
sullen, disrespectful of authority, a loner, someone who operates in a
moral gray area. You’ve also just described a typical 21st century
teenager.
Brick takes the trappings of that hardboiled
detective story and sets it in the milieu of a modern suburban high
school. A teenager named Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt of TV’s Third Rock From the Sun)
finds his former girlfriend’s body in a culvert and decides that he’s
better qualified than the police to find her killer.
With help from his
one friend, a studious loner called Brain, Brendan starts working his way
through the high school cliques to get close to The Pin (i.e. drug
kingpin), someone his girlfriend had mentioned before she died.
Along the way he meets The Pin’s muscle, and of course a femme fatale,
and these characters are written by way of Elisha Cook and Mary Astor.
The Pin turns out to bear a slight resemblance to a cross between
Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.
The convoluted plot plays
the classic noir program absolutely straight. It is not pastiche or
even homage; it is a straight forward film noir, just with everyone
about 17 years old. The scene between the assistant vice principal
(Richard Roundtree) and Brendan follows the pattern of every cop
warning the detective not to get in over his head because he can only
protect him so far; the only thing that’s different is that the argot
is of a reasonably literate teenager (“I [snitched on a rival] to see
him eaten, not to see you fed.”).
The dialogue often is too
cutesy for its own good; first time writer/director Rian Johnson
created his own jargon that is often incomprehensible to parse. But
that’s where those familiar with the intricacies of film noir can use
their knowledge; the characters could be speaking Cantonese, but you could still
tell that the assistant vice principal is warning Brendan that he’ll
come down on him hard if he screws up.
For a low budget indie
film the acting is generally excellent, particularly Gordon-Levitt. His
character sits outside all the social interactions of high school (in
the movie, it’s important to know who is eating lunch with whom), but
is intimately aware of how to use those interactions to get to the
people he wants to reach. He even manages to make his character’s
ability to defeat a much larger opponent in a fight credible, despite
his small stature...although a somewhat beefier actor might have made
the action scenes a little easier to believe.
The actor playing the
high school BMOC (Brian White) chews the scenery worse than any actor
I’ve ever seen in a movie, but Nora Zehetner (late of the TV show Heroes) hits all the right notes as the femme fatale with eyes any man or boy would want to dive into. Emily de Ravin of Lost has a small role as the ill-fated ex-girlfriend.
The
film reportedly cost about a half million bucks to make and grossed $2
million at the box office, grossing an additional $10 million in
video rentals -- DVDs may be the best thing to ever happen to independent
films. Not bad for a Special Jury Prize winner at the Sundance Film
Festival; some Sundance prize winners have done better, but most have
done worse (I’ve never heard of the Grand Jury Prize winner the year Brick played there, 40 Shades of Blue).
Brick is more than just the gimmick of putting a hardboiled detective story in a high school. It’s not a novelty like Bugsy Malone,
which was a gangster film with child actors instead of adults. The noir
trappings fit the modern teen setting like a glove. I suppose even Sam
Spade had to have been a teenager once.
