Brick

A guy I work with, a struggling wannabe screenwriter, he's all about the high-concept postmodern conceit. Every idea he comes up with for a film consists of a mash-up of two familiar styles. A hybrid horror/serial adventure. A comic take on the Japanese superhero cartoon. Zombies in outer space. This is his favorite movie thus far in 2006.

High concepts don't come much higher than Brick, a very clever take on the detective noir that's certain to be a favorite of video store nerds and film school undergrads the nation over. Rian Johnson's Sundance hit has a terrific set-up: a mystery set at a high school that unfolds with all the trappings and style of old-fashioned noir film. Sometimes, a clever premise like that makes for a great film. Most of the time, as with Brick, it just makes for a great pitch and a mediocre finished product.



There are two ways to approach a film noir set in a public school. You either make the noir movie, with the fact that it happens among suburban teens rather than inner-city hoods glossed over as an afterthought, or you make a mystery at a high school with some noir flourishes. Johnson's gone with the former route, steeping his film with so much detective movie attitude and swagger, the high school setting comes to seem rather ridiculous. I think I would have probably taken the latter approach and tried to make a movie that works simply as a story about some teenagers. As it stands, I doubt viewers unfamiliar with old '40s Hollywood thrillers would be interested in Brick at all. "Why is everyone talking like that?," they'd wonder. "And why should I give a shit who killed this guy's ex-girlfriend?"

Because, let's face it, it's not as if no one had thought of this particular postmodern conceit before Rian Johnson came along. "Veronica Mars" has been working the high school detective beat for two seasons already, and does a better job of placing familiar noir material in a modern and believable high school setting. I was reminded during Brick as well of the ill-fated Cruel Intentions, which featured high school students re-enacting Dangerous Liasons with similarly silly results.

Brick works better than that film mainly on the strength of its performances. Cruel Intentions felt like a high school production of Dangerous Liasons, with teens crudely approximating the mature personalities of the main characters. Brick at least has the semblance of actual noir's gritty insouciance. When one actor leers at another and delivers a colorful parting shot, there's genuine venom behind the eyes rather than the vapid emptiness of a Ryan Phillippe. The young actors must work mightily to translate this pulpy, exaggerated dialogue to the screen naturally, as they might as well be qutoing Psalms to one another for all the realism evident here. I know, I know, he's trying to make it all sound like a James Cain novel, but a high school student asking another why he "took a powder" just sounds goofy and wrong. I'm sorry.

Unlike a Cain or Chandler protagonist, Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) isn't really an anti-hero. A loner who eats his lunch by himself behind the portables (get it?), he's never had much need for the rich kids' clique at his school until he receives a distressed call from ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin). She's babbling incoherently - something about a pin and a brick - and the next thing Brendan knows, she turns up dead. So he does what any teen might do - stashes the body and starts scanning the school for clues to her killer(s).

The movie starts out pretty well. Like I said, it's a clever premise. Early conversations between Brendan and his savvy friend, called The Brain (Matt O'Leary), introduce the viewer to the underworld of the high school. In these early passages, Johnson tries as best he can to tie the contemporary environment of the rundown public school to the urban streets of the '40s. In that world, in films like The Street With No Name, Murder My Sweet and Where the Sidewalk Ends, crime is sometimes a last resort for desperate men. It can even be a lifestyle, one adopted early on and by choice. But many times in these films, crime is the downfall of a good man lured by temptation and vice. Like some of the classic noirs, in the world of Brick, crime seems a refuge from inert boredom, a way to act out against a controlling, conformist society that seems to offer no other opportunities for financial success and personal freedom.

The trial of Emily's murderers eventually leads Brendan to investigate the organization of a local drug lord known as The Pin (Lukas Haas in the film's best and most deadpan performance).



Once again, Johnson plays up the similarities to the old films. We meet The Pin in a large, formally-decorated wood-paneled office. He wears a cape and carries with him an oversized cane. He surrounds himself with toughs and sycophantic followers. But unlike the mob bosses in the films of old - stone cold psychopathic killers like Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death - The Pin's still just a kid, in over his head. During one intense stand-off, his mother interrupts to fix the boys something to eat.

I suppose Johnson's overarching idea might be that, for teens in modern suburbia, the future's as bleak as it was for the criminals in the movies of Edward Dmytryk and Otto Preminger. Sure, the houses are more comfortable and the amenities nicer. No one has to turn to a life of crime to keep their sainted mother out of the poor house or get their children back from social services, like in the old movies.

But there's a desperation to the actions of these kids nonetheless. Why would Emily hook up with lowlifes like The Pin and Dode the junkie (Noah Segan)? What does the rich girl, Laura (Nora Zehetner), see in these losers, who can promise her nothing except some additional money to throw around? Exactly what could have happened to make the generally-unhinged but cherub-faced Tug (Noah Fleiss) so violent?

So I'm not trying to say that there's no point to Johnson's compilation of genres. Interesting ideas do surface throughout Brick, popping up from the cracks between the tectonic plates of film noir and adolescent hijinks. But it's not enough to sustain an entire film, and eventually Johnson comes to rely too heavily on the inside jokiness and the mainly uninteresting maneuvers of the plot, losing track of any kind of real point on his way to a pat conclusion.

The turning point comes in a scene where Brendan is called to the Vice Principal's office (or the Ass V.P., in Brick terminology). Richard Roundtree plays the principal, and he does a nice job with the difficult verbiage, but the scene just doesn't work at all. Johnson's unable to create a scene that feels realistic for both the film's worlds - it sounds a lot like a scene from a noir film in which a detective and a police officer battle it out for territory, but absolutely nothing like a student speaking to his vice-principal.

Regardless of whether or not a movie cares about realism, it has to feel authentic to itself and the rules it has established. Brick begins by having fun with its peculiar gimmick. Outlandish characters, like a drama student perenially changing costumes (Meagan Good), recall the eccentric supporting characters that filled out the ensemble casts of yore. But Johnson expects us to relate to them as people, to sympathize with their plights, and this is just not to be. His characters and the scenarios they enact are jokes, insightful references to old movies. They don't exist as autonomous people in their own right.

Who could believe in a cape-clad teenager running drugs through his mother's basement teamed with a squad of 20 goons in tank tops? The very concept is ludicrous. If Johnson were content to have ludicrous fun, you probably still wouldn't have a great movie, but you'd have one that's at least enjoyable to sit through.

In the last act, when the stakes are raised and the situation turns suddenly and inexplicably violent, Johnson really loses the thread. It's a sudden shift in tone, a sharp coda for what has been kind of a silly riff up until that point. (Yes, I know there's a dead girl in the beginning, but these stories always have to begin with someone dead. Those Charlie Chan movies begin with a corpse and they're anything but heavy).

There's just something about Brick overall that feels a little to easy. Everything holds together well and fits into the motif. Johnson even gets the little details right - how Brendan keeps getting beaten up and knocked unconscious during the film, getting a little bit bloodier and more bruised with each passing set piece; how partially overheard conversations come to drive the action in the second half; how the hero takes advantage of social custom and general inattentiveness; how Brendan's quiet reserve hides a deep and frightening core of anger and repressed violence. But he never stops making a throwback gimmicky noir and just makes an interesting, suspenseful mystery.

After watching the film, I'm positive Rian Johnson has watched a buttload of old noir movies. The question is, did he ever go to high school?