Brick

dir: Rian Johnson
[img_assist|nid=854|title=Brick - neo noir for the tween set|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=450|height=338]
Brick has a central conceit who presence balances the movie on a knife’s edge of being tolerable or intolerable: if you can stomach teenagers (or actors pretending to be teenagers) chewing over the hard-boiled dialogue of 40s noir in a contemporary setting, then you might enjoy Brick. If not, Brick will be one of the more pointless experiences you will endure this or any other year.

Brick has dialogue sometimes so hard to say and so hard to understand that you wonder if you’re watching a National Geographic documentary about some hitherto unknown American tribe discovered in the ruins of an ancient mall. But therein, for me at least, lies the fun. The director had been trying to get this project off the ground for nearly a decade, and has succeeded where so many others would have given up or caved in to soulless studio reps.

Take the thickened plot and chewy dialogue out, and you’re left with nothing of interest to anyone. Leave it in, and you get something that works most of the time, falters at others, but still remains interesting throughout. This first time director’s mistakes are sometimes as interesting as the times when he gets it right.

Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an isolated but cluey high school student in your anything but average American high school. Moody and cynical, he is our protagonist and hero / anti-hero in the direct tradition of Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe and every other detective from the last 70 years of cinema. The film opens with him staring forlornly at the body of an as yet unidentified girl.

The flick then backtracks a couple of days into the past, so we can see how events led to this sad state of affairs. Brendan receives a mysterious note from ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin), and senses she’s in deep trouble.

He occupies a strange place in the school’s rigid hierarchy. Being outside of any of the cliques, he moves through them at will, and even has a strange sort of green-light from the administration (representing the law, though the cops are referred to separately as the ‘bulls’). It’s funny that The Man, as in the assistant Vice Principal is played by Richard Roundtree, of Shaft fame.

With the aid of The Brain (Matt O’Leary), he sets about trying to unravel the great mystery of, at first, why Emily is in trouble, and later on, why she was murdered. Like any gumshoe worth his fedora, Brendan shakes the tree, stirs up trouble and plays factions off of each other in order to see all the angles.

All of the conversations he has along the way are peppered with the kinds of phrases that wouldn’t be out of place in the novels of Dashiell Hammett or in the descriptive language of Raymond Chandler, but which seem decidedly odd coming out of these mouths. With the exception of Brendan, many of the other actors seem to be struggling with the language, which is no fatal flaw in my book. Their difficulty with the words heightens the artificiality of the construct, one which would have been dull had it been played straight.

If you had the same story played absolutely straight, it would have hardly raised any notice or hackles out there in the greater world. The plot, whilst appropriately convoluted, is hardly the kind of thing to keep one up at night.

It’s the way these people are playing stock types from ye olden days and speaking like them too (without, perhaps, the timing and elocution one would expect from that era), yet looking like contemporary adolescents that is the hook. All of the thematic, plot machinations and characters from noir are there, but none of the imagery and cinematography that we expect.

As such, it’s highly stylised and highly strange. It reminded me of a flick from ages ago starring Jodie Foster called Bugsy Malone, where the twist on the genre had child actors playing the roles of gangsters and the molls who love them from the Prohibition era. They also had pie fights instead of shootouts, which is far more satisfying from an intellectual and gastronomical point of view.

That disconnect is what arises here, but then when you think about it, there are plenty of teenagers in plenty of countries including the United States where age doesn’t preclude them from committing serious crimes covering the whole spectrum from murder and drug running to having really bad hairstyles.

So it’s the language, which isn’t really that anachronistic, since most of the slang and tortured grammar is made up, that truly sets this film apart.

There are a few other homages as well to the noir classics. Brendan’s investigations and travails lead him to pursue the local boogieman, a crime overlord called The Pin (Lukas Haas). Whilst visiting, and in-between his numerous beatings, The Pin speaks to him in a basement where, wouldn’t you know it, there’s the statue of a falcon. I don’t know if it’s Maltese or not, but it does the trick. Though he looks nothing like him, The Pin is clearly supposed to be Sydney Greenstreet, which is used extremely comical effect, especially in a scene where the Pin’s mother doles out cookies and juice.

All the femmes in this are fatales, always either offering danger or in danger themselves. Brendan trusts none of them but perforce needs to use them and be used by them to get where he needs to be. The scenes with the ladies are the ones that sound the most like the rapid-fire, sexual tension-filled exchanges of the ancient films we’re supposed to be thinking about.

The flick is filled with strong scenes and a few choice sequences. One particularly funny sequence has Brendan pursued by a hired gun, or knife, as the case may be, and electing to turn the tables on him in a pretty nifty fashion. Other scenes pit Brendan against his enemies in the Upper Crust, being the school’s aristocratic / criminal elite, where dialogue and fisticuffs settle the day, and blood is the price of progress.

It’s true as well that there are numerous scenes that fall flat, or seem downright amateurish in how their realised. With a $500,000 budget, there were clearly limitations on the amount of times scenes could be redone or reshot, or shot in a more effective manner, and it shows. The acting, as well, isn’t the flick’s greatest strength. Apart from Gordon-Levitt, who is fantastic in the role, and perhaps Laura (Nora Zehetner), as one of the femmes fatale, the rest of the work is fairly average.

As previously stated, it’s the dialogue that matters. It may be a bit hard to hear sometimes, but it pays off with a keen ear. The plot and its resolution are in keeping with the spirit of the noir origins this film reappraises and gently mocks, but it’s hardly one to stick in the cerebellum. Some of those phrases, though, bring a smile to the face and are worth the price of admissions alone, long after the credits have rolled.

8 bricks to the head of the uninitiated out of 10

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“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 so, and after four or five connections the list always ends with the Pin. But I bet if you got every rat in town together and said 'show your hands' if any of them have actually seen the Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets.” – The Brain, Brick.