***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, Matt O’Leary, and Noah Fleiss
Directed & written by Rian Johnson
2005 (wide release 2006)
110 min R
Oh, what was it that F. Scott Fitzgerald said? Something like “genius is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind and still be able to function”? And no other movie from 2006 fulfills the particular mission statement more than Rian Johnson’s “Brick.”
Yes, every second of this movie is hilarious, as SoCal teenagers talk to each other as if they’re in a 1940s hard-
bitten film noir, wrapped in drug deals, murders, and class conflict.
To wit, the “detective” asks: “Dope runner, right?”
And “The Brain” replies: “Big time. See The Pin pipes it from the lowest scraper for Brad Bramish to sell, maybe. Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that, who scored it from this, who bought it off so, and after four or five connections the list always ends with The Pin. But I bet you, if you got every rat in town together and said “Show your hands” if any of them've actually seen The Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets.”
Or the femme fatale and the detective: “Do you trust me now?” “Less than when I didn’t trust you before.”
Or “the police chief” (who’s actually the vice principal) and the detective.
“You've helped this office out before.”
“No, I gave you Jerr to see him eaten, not to see you fed.”
“Fine. And very well put.”
“Accelerated English, Mrs. Kasprzyk.”
And, of course, “I don't want you to come kicking in my homeroom door because of something I didn't do.”
The joke works because NO ONE ACTS LIKE IT’S A JOKE. There’s never a wink, never a nod, never an over-the-shoulder glance at the audience, asking us “this is funny, right?”
And that’s what make “Brick” so special. Because it plays straight, it becomes like any other fictional universe, however fantastic: once you understand and accept its rules, and get over that none of these children appear to have parents, “Brick” works as a sincere drama. There are twists, turns, mysteries, and they all work beyond the level of parody or homage. As ridiculous as their situation is, we feel for these characters; “Brick” has the courage to be earnest, where a weaker might just snicker.
In the DVD commentary, director-writer Rian Johnson says that his goal was to create a classical noir with new visual cues. So the detective becomes a ratty outcast (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) looking for the killer of his girlfriend, the class conflict becomes cliques, locations are scattered around the high school, and the femme fatal becomes a dangerous hottie, not as attached to her football star boyfriend as she lets on. Master criminal The Pin (Lukas Haas – I love it) lives with his mom and rides in the back of a minivan with a lamp.
Noirs come in basically two forms: in “the good person led astray” kind, like “Blood Simple,” “Double Indemnity,” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” plotting kept relatively simple, so that the good person’s ultimate downfall becomes inevitable. Detective noirs, however, pride themselves on blinding complexity (Raymond Chandler famously wrote but could not solve “The Big Sleep”).
“Brick” falls in the latter category, and I’ll be damned if I can remember how it all unwinds. Suffice it to say, the detective’s modus operandi is to get the daylights beaten out of him at regular intervals until he finally gets his answers. He pauses in his investigations only when the femme fatale (Nora Zehetner) protests about all the blood he’s swallowed. The kicks-to-the-shin he delivers to an uncooperative jock in the parking lot still make me wince.
Don’t let the teenage players fool you: Johnson has not created a rap-heavy MTV quick-edit fest. He keeps his images clean, lingering on mad sunsets and even shooting Haas in shadows heavy enough to make him an eyeless head floating in the darkness. Nathan Johnson (no relation) provides a down-hearted score with “found instruments” like old guitars and glass bottles.
“I’ve got knives in my eyes. I’m going home sick.”
No, high school wasn’t really like this, but maybe it seemed that way when we were in it. Or at least maybe we always wished it were this way, with villains to topple and hotties to love and betray us – anything to justify the gloom ‘n doom outlook our hormones already made us feel. “Brick” is one of the best movies I saw in 2006. It’s so cool that, when it sleeps, sheep count it.
Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night