Review: Brick (2006)

Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a brooding high school student with problems that I imagine a majority of teenagers can relate to at some point or another. His girlfriend, Emily (Emilie De Raven) resenting him for being so closed of, has recently ditched him for another clique. To retaliate, Brendan rats Emily’s new boyfriend out to the VP (Richard Roundtree, welcome in any film), who as a result, now views him as his own personal stool pigeon and whipping boy.

Perhaps unavoidably, Emily’s new clique also hates him, he feels detached from everyone else and eats alone, and, at least over the course of the film, only converses with one character who doesn’t resent or want to hurt him, and that would be the Brain (Matt O’Leary), who’s more comfortable watching and reading than doing (screw being a teen I can relate to that now) but, fortunately, as a result can be depended on for dirt on just about everyone else, probably because nobody notices him, which is at least preferred to the more malicious attention that Brendan receives.

Brenden’s other major crisis, and one that I hope most teens can’t relate to, is that Emily, is, at the start of the film, dead. Her vitality and livelihood, as well as Brendan’s hopes of ever again having her, seemingly washing away in the drain pipe she was either killed or deposited in. This opening, with Brendan discovering Emily in the drain pipe, the most we see of her being the strange blue bracelet she wore, is jarringly beautiful and melancholy. It has an erotic dread that instantly recalls the dead Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks , the genre bending, culture defining noir TV series from the early 1990s. Brick is a genre bender too, a surprising hybrid of noir and high school melodrama, a film where dodging class, and solving the murder of your ex-girlfriend carry not entirely unequal weight.

Brendan, like many a P.I. and love lorn sucker before him, sets out to solve and avenge Emily’s murder, and over the course of his investigation, he brushes up against the kinds of oddballs and eccentrics that you can depend on a noir to provide. I won’t go through all of them, discovery is half the fun in a film like this, but I will say that, besides Levitt’s compelling, grounded lead performance (following his implosive, brilliant turn in last year’s under looked Mysterious Skin), the characters that most impressed me were “The Pin” (Lukas Haas) a slightly older drug dealing string puller who dresses like a German Expressionist’s version of a vampire bat, limps on a cane and lives with his mother, Tugger (Noah Fleiss), The Pin’s henchman, a hot head who engages (in one of Brick’s best scenes) Brendan in a game of chicken in a parking lot, and, the sirens of the film, Laura (Nora Zehetner), who’s playing one of the Pin’s best dealers, and Kara (Meagan Good), a drama guru who, as Brendan puts it, “picks her teeth with freshman.”

I loved parts of this film and the high school noir fusion is gimmicky but reinvigorates both genres in surprising, rewarding ways. High school is a perfect backdrop for the inherent paranoia of the noir genre, and the setting seems to heighten the stakes of everything involved. He may talk like it, but Brendan isn’t Bogart, and he’s never able to totally hide his vulnerability. (Though, truthfully, neither was Bogart, and that’s part of the secret to his everlasting appeal. “You think no one notices you eating lunch by yourself”, Laura tells him, in a wonderful scene that I’m paraphrasing, “but they do.” Brick is a stunt, but it’s a stunt with a surprisingly deep current of teenage ache.

The film’s writer-director Rian Johnson (in his debut, he previously edited the overlooked horror film May) displays an intimidating, dazzling control of atmosphere and mood, but his ambitions sabotage him toward the end. In the second half, Brick becomes more obviously a contraption, playing the old incomprehensible plot game that so famously served The Big Sleep many years ago. Here it’s a fizzle, and by the time Brendan finds Emily’s killer he’s lost in so many other double crosses that he didn’t seem to care any more than I did. All’s forgiven though in the quiet, knockout final scene that underlines just how much was at stake.

- Bowen

Posted on March 24th, 2007 in 2006, Reviews |

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