Dir.
Rian Johnson, US, 2005, 110 mins
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner
Review by Carol Allen
Brick has the virtue of a really original idea, which is to make a
classic film noir set in the teenage high school world using the
linguistic style of Hammett and Chandler in place of the usual "dudespeak".
The Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe character here is Brendan (Gordon-Levitt),
a bit of a loner, who is trying to find ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie
de Ravin), after getting a panic-stricken phone call from her. It's
not too long before he finds her dead body at the entrance to a
waterlogged tunnel, and in what then becomes a hunt for her killer,
aided by his bright and nerdy fellow gumshoe The Brain (Matt O'Leary),
he encounters a whole cast of film noir types, including the would-be
sophisticated, rich-girl vamp (Zehetner), the thug (Noah Fleiss) and
finally the high school drug lord The Pin (Haas), who walks with a limp
and sports a stylish black overcoat and falcon-headed walking stick.
On the plus side, the film has very good performances from Gordon-Levitt
and Haas. The former also shows himself to be very good at running - he
does a lot of it - and capable of taking heavy punishment in some really
convincing and violent fights, while Haas has a really strong screen
presence. It is also very skilfully and handsomely shot. The other
actors, however, are not so convincing. Zehetner, for example, is no
Lauren Bacall. Like any film noir, the plot is incredibly complicated,
made even more difficult to follow when the actors mumble, as when
Zehetner towards the end is revealing the dénouement. As I could not
hear a word of her speech, I am still in the dark. Which is a shame,
as one area where writer/director Johnson has really succeeded is in
capturing the authentic film noir language. The high school setting is
also unconvincing. There is no sign of other students, the characters
never seem to have any lessons to go to and the action that does take
place on campus is largely set on and around what looks to me like a
concrete sports area with a really aesthetically ugly school building
in the background. The characters' few interactions with adults, who
are also conspicuously absent most of the time, are also weird.
Brendan's encounter with the school principal (Richard Rowntree),
analogous with the gumshoe's traditionally wary relationship with the
forces of law and order, works quite well, but there is one bizarre
scene in The Pin's kitchen, where his mum is pressing cereal and juice
on him and Brendan, apparently blissfully unaware that her son is a
murderous teenage drugs baron locked in mortal conflict with his guest,
which is just surreal. And in view of the fact that, despite its use
of a ‘40s genre, the story is set in today's world, it is odd that
nobody appears to have a mobile phone. Brendan spends an amazing
amount of time hanging around a public telephone box waiting for calls.
Unlike Bugsy Malone, which, by using a cheeky, musical genre, got away
with charming us into accepting that its child actors were gangsters and
molls, the effect here is more of teenagers in the school play trying to
act like grown-ups and failing.
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