REVIEW: Brick

Since the end of black and white, film noir has struggled as a genre. The advent of day-bright Technicolor seemed to mortally dim the genre’s popularity. With its stylish but grim view of humanity, the pure noir film felt tired and out of place during the radical, love-in Sixties. Even when the genre returned during the societal cynicism of the following decade, classics like Chinatown or Point Blank either feel like homages or pale in comparison to the likes of Key Largo, The Big Combo, or Double Indemnity. It’s almost as if the noir film can’t be complete without the visual impact of German Expressionism, lost when movies’ color palate changed from monochrome to a rainbow.

Which makes Brick all that more a pleasant surprise. At first glance yet another high school black comedy/thriller, the film instead is a crackerjack noir flick through and through. It manages to tread carefully among the well-worn archetypes without waylaying into parody or self-awareness, delivering instead a vibrant crime story in the classic form.

The film opens with stillness. A young man is crouched on the edge of a drainage ditch, his hands folded. He is staring at a body of a young woman.

The story cuts back, two days earlier. The young man, Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), finds a note at his locker from his ex-girlfriend Emily, asking him to wait for her call by a pay phone. When he answers, her voice is shaking, hesitant, scared. She’s in trouble, and something frightens her away before she can explain. A mysterious car roars by, and Brendan realizes Emily was just around the corner.

With little to go on other than the scratches Emily blurted out, Brendan begins his search, first going to his informer friend “The Brain” for a direction. During the next several hours, Brendan encounters slightly altered archetypes of old: the siren, lost souls, stylish parties, mysterious notes written in code, whispers of a crime lord. Camera tricks and cinematic style are hurled at you, giftwrapped in clipped, slang-ridden dialog that sounds like the bastard child of Hammett and Hinton. For 20 minutes, Brick fulfills every expectation.

And then writer/director Rian Johnson hits the reset button. The ditch, the body. Brendan suddenly looks up, hears someone in the dark tunnel. And without hesitation, he runs into it.

From that moment on, Brick becomes more than a simple redress of genre tropes. The tunnel is symbolism with a sledgehammer: All bets are off for Brendan, and from this moment forward, he has no idea where his pursuit will end. The neat trick is that the audience doesn’t either. They enter the tunnel with Brendan, suddenly realizing they’ve lost their safety net of assumptions.

Brick manages to keep its crime story vital by populating it with odd, enigmatic characters: Laura the rich girl temptress, Dode the punk-greaser hybrid, Kara the theatrical black widow, Tug the pressure-cooked enforcer, and, especially, The Pin, Brick’s young crime lord-in-the-making. None have a real backstory, not even Brendan. Instead of growing and changing, the characters gradually reveal their true natures, never allowing the audience to come to grips with their first impressions. Each character can find a predecessor from the classic era, but each is slightly translated through the high school environment, providing small, odd, humorous surprises. And that’s where the movie either lives or falters.

When Brick was unleashed in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical release, it got a good amount of publicity for that high school setting, but in reality, it’s nothing more than seasoning. Instead of tricking out a Heathers clone with hardboiled attributes, Johnson actually does the reverse. He only appropriates the vague outlines of high school drama clichés--the tyrannical assistant principal, the schoolyard brawl, the teen party. He’s simply dropping a noir story into an unexpected setting to see what window dressing changes. Instead of a limo, The Pin cruises around in a plush van. Instead the expected confrontation between the gumshoe and the police, we have the confrontation between Brendan and the vice principal (Richard Roundtree, in a fabulously straight-laced cameo). Although the actors are playing it as if they were living in Mickey Spillane’s universe, the situations themselves become entertainingly absurd because the context is skewed.

This tenuous fantasy Johnson has constructed works only because every player sells it without any wink or nudge. Gordon-Levitt, best known for his work on “3rd Rock from the Sun,” has the toughest assignment--it’s hard to play stone stoic convincingly, but he manages by expressing his emotion subtly through body language. His is a physical performance of limitation, and the rest of cast follows suit. Lukas Haas stands out as The Pin; with his black cape and cane, he projects an aura of quiet menace that imbues his youthful appearance. Noah Fleiss as Tug and Matt O’Leary as the Brain bring a nice touch of humanity to two roles that are more caricature than character, while Emilie de Ravin is suitably vulnerable as Emily. Only Nora Zehetner struggles a bit as the sultry Laura; she’s very good, but she simply isn’t as believable as the others. At times, she almost seems to be playing her role conscientiously rather than disappearing into it.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Brick, however, is the visuals. Whoever led the design--Johnson, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, or projection designer Jodie Lynn Tillen--replaced the traditional black and white with a stark but muted look for Brick. Each scene is lit coldly, sometimes dimly, and one color in each setting dominates the others. Combined with the hardboiled style of Johnson’s direction and editing, Brick’s visual sense recalls the visceral garnish of Hong Kong thrillers, dialed down to create an almost benign tension.

In some respects, the film’s style may be too much, at times drowning the characters rather than enhancing them. Laura’s teen party near the beginning is the closest Johnson ever comes to upsetting his delicate universe; Laura’s a rich kid, but her parent’s neo-classical house seems pulled out intact from an affluent speakeasy of the Roaring Twenties, and the high school partiers act as if they belonged more to that decade rather than the current one. It’s the only time in the film where the characters’ age clashes with the story’s tone, and the result rings false. Other situations work because they exist purely in the high school environment, creating a believable foundation for the young characters, but the film teeters on cracking it with what is probably an ill-advised homage.

But with few real missteps, Brick remains one of those cinematic oddities--a unified vision that transforms a gimmick into genuine personal expression. Johnson obviously loves these stories, and his cast and crew crafted more than a tribute to a nearly lost genre; they’ve created the real thing. With a slight twist. The end result is unique and old school all at once, and that’s something as rare as noir itself.

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Film Information
Year Released: 2005
Director: Rian Johnson
Main Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Noah Fleiss
Trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/brick/trailer/