BRICK
Issue #27
directed by Rian Johnson
By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: March 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
In high school, it seems like everything is a matter of life or (social) death. So Rian Johnson’s decision to use it as the setting for his noirish, hard-boiled detective story is a clever conceit. Brick, Johnson’s debut feature, owes more to The Maltese Falcon than She’s All That, something that both distinguishes the film and saddles it with an often cumbersome burden. To say that it eludes believability is both the point and beside the point. Brick, much like the high school students it depicts, operates in its own universe, strictly defined by an arsenal of idiosyncratic codes and behavior. They don’t make a lot of sense, but are, if nothing else, consistent in their weirdness.
Every detective story needs its Sam Spade or Nancy Drew, and Brick has one in Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a sullen loner still pining for his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin). When Emily turns up dead in an irrigation canal, Brendan becomes obsessed with unraveling the mystery surrounding her death. He’s duly sucked into a netherworld of teen drug dealers, bizarre theme parties, and conniving queen bees. Aided by The Brain (Matt O’Leary), a tech-geek with apparently unlimited knowledge of everyone and everything in town, Brendan finds his way to the Pin (Lukas Haas), a club-footed drug dealer whose stark, wood-paneled office is located in his mom’s basement. The fact that Brick’s funniest moment comes when a tense meeting between the Pin and his lackeys is interrupted by a maternal offer of cookies more or less sums up all that’s right and wrong with this film.
On one hand, Johnson is demanding that we take his characters as seriously as they take themselves, complete with their improbable slang (the film’s press notes come with a glossary) and beyond-their-years business dealings. On the other, we’re invited to laugh at their pretensions or to at least view them with an ironic smirk. Johnson can’t have it both ways, which results in a story that — despite great work from Gordon-Levitt and the inspired casting of Richard Roundtree as the school’s vice principal — is more half-baked than hard-boiled.
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more