Brick features Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brendan, a high school loner who gets a crack at playing hard-boiled detective as he independently tries to solve the murder of his former girlfriend, Emily. Over the course of several days he immerses himself in the complicated social strata of his high school (where school itself is, at best, a distraction; I don’t think any actual classroom time is logged in this movie). From there, Brendan delivers and receives numerous beatings, is stuffed into a trunk of a muscle car, plants evidence, deciphers codes, and conducts ad-hoc interviews of witnesses. Like any good noir, there’s much intrigue, many twists, shady dealings, ambiguous motivations, and, of course, the murder at the heart of it.
I really enjoyed Brick. Gordon-Levitt in particular is great, and most of the other characters who round out the cast are really solid, too. My biggest complaint is that I wish the movie had been slightly more judicious with the period dialogue and, in general, with trying to squeeze some noir into every element of high school life. Virtually every line sounds like it’s ripped from a pulpy forties detective story. That’s great fun and all, but I did find it wearing after a while when you had to pretty much bend your ear so that you could re-process every word of slang, every idiom. Normally your ear and brain working together can do marvelous things where, if you miss a few words of dialogue, your brain can fill in the gaps; that didn’t really work here. Moreover, the fact that this is all coming from the mouths of teenagers begs a little too much disbelief sometimes. You could argue that about the whole story, but the fun of it is the novel setting. If the players don’t act a little bit more like high school students, then there’s not much point in having set a murder mystery there to begin with.
Examples of fun/frustrating dialogue:
Brendan: No, bulls would gum it. They’d flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes and probably find some yegg to pin, probably even the right one. But they’d trample the real tracks and scare the real players back into their holes, and if we’re doing this I want the whole story. No cops, not for a bit.
and
Brendan: Uh-huh. And he wants cash on the nail. He’s a pot-skulled reef worm with more hop in his head than blood. Why pay for dirt you can’t believe?
The slick composure displayed by virtually every character is a little bothersome, too. For most of the movie, Brendan remains surprisingly implacable for a guy who finds the corpse of and then must investigate the death of the girl he loves. I believe it was the AV Club reviewer who made the point that choosing to set a noir story, a genre usually marked by pessimistic outooks, in a high school, with its inherently pessimistic outlook, actually makes a lot of sense. In that way, a lot of the cynical dialogue and the way these kids interact in such world-weary ways doesn’t seem totally far-fetched. But again, as with the argot, it’s more a question of degree: I would have welcomed seeing just a little more teenage behavior seep into the characters.
Still, the way the noir elements are fit into a high school setting is pretty fun. Brendan has apparently informed on an enemy to his vice principal before the film’s opening, and the scene that plays out between him and the VP is more like that between a disgruntled cop and his chief. Costume parties and school plays provide amusing excuses for our femme fatales to be a little more easily identified as such (one girl is dressed as a lounge singer and plays a little mood music for the party she throws where Brendan first goes to gather clues on Emily; another wears a geisha costume during Brendan’s confrontation with her and, naturally, declines to give him any information he needs).
Occasionally the movie reminds you that we are, in fact, still dealing with high school students. These scenes don’t really gel with the overall tone of the rest of the movie; however, I’m glad they’re there because they provide a pretty great juxtaposition where you go from a scene where Brendan is threatened in the basement of a drug kingpin to being shepherded up to the kingpin’s kitchen where the kingpin’s mother obliviously offers her son’s guests cereal and juice.
As with virtually every noir film I’ve ever seen, I would probably need to rewatch this one to make perfect sense of the who’s and why’s of everything, but while it could be complicated at times, it was’t so needlessly convoluted that it detracted from the story. Overall, I give Brick four out of five badly-cut bricks of heroin.
Sarah watches stuff. 