Review: Brick
It is difficult for me not to feel an affinity for a guy whose first film was called Evil Demon Golfball From Hell!!! That’s film school filmmaking at its finest, if you ask me. But since Rian Johnson graduated film school in 1996, he has been at work trying to get his first feature film, Brick, off the ground. Ten years later, the result is ours to enjoy. Alas, no pesky golfballs this time. Brick is classic noir, and Johnson has cited the influence of Dashiell Hammet on his work. The catch is that Brick is a detective story set in a high school. Everything is tweaked to fit the mold of an old-fashioned murder mystery, and either you can go with such a gimmick or you can’t. I could, and I found Brick definitely brilliant in tone and brilliant in pieces, if not quite brilliant in sum.
The plot runs thick: Loner Brendan Frye (played well by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who continues the rise to indie stardom that he began with his excellent performance in last year’s Mysterious Skin, a movie that is perhaps even more bizarre than Brick) investigates first the disappearance and then the death of his ex-girlfriend Emily (played by Lost-star Emilie de Ravin). In the course of the investigation, he navigates among both drug dealers like the Pin (Lukas Haas) and school officials like Assistant Vice Principal Gary Trueman (Richard Roundtree, otherwise known as that icon among modern private detectives, John Shaft). Unfortunately, there’s a weak link in the cast, and it’s Noah Fleiss’s Tugger, the Pin’s muscle and the biggest thorn in Brendan’s side. The others all take turns giving Brendan trouble, but he takes the greatest amount of abuse (and yes, Brendan gets beat up a lot in this film) from Tugger. Fleiss just isn’t the right guy for this role; he has the biceps but not the acting skills necessary to pull off any real menace. His average abilities become more and more of a problem as his importance to the film increases.
The true star of the show is the language. Borrowing extensively from the noir dictionary, Johnson manages to infuse his own new spin on the slang, and I would’ve preferred it if the language had saturated the film to the extent that it does in films such as Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. At the screening I went to, primers on “Brick Talk” were placed on every chair. Reading through the small booklet was a welcome diversion from the usual slew of pre-film advertisements and was one of the best parts of going to see the film. (Some samples: “It’s duck soup for you yegs,” meaning it’s easy pickings for you guys; and, “He’s a pot skulled reef worm with more hop in his head than blood,” meaning he’s pretty high.)
The central image of the film is quite haunting: a dead girl at the mouth of a drainage tunnel, her hand trailing in the shallow stream of dark, filthy water. Johnson lingers on the shot, and it builds a dark atmosphere to the film that makes the events far creepier and more disturbing than the story may actually warrant. Because in the end, this is just a movie about a drug deal gone bad. But for most of its running time, it suggests with a very Donnie Darko-like vibe that anything can happen. Time warps, mad bunnies, who knows? I had the feeling for some reason that the Pin was going to turn out to be a vampire, but no such luck.
One of the clear influences on the film that I couldn’t stop thinking about while I was watching Brick is the under-seen and brilliant Coen brothers’ film, Miller’s Crossing. After watching Brick, I went home to rewatch Miller’s Crossing. In the process, I was reminded of all the things that Brick ultimately failed to do: namely, drama and cohesion. There is mystery to spare but not so much drama in Brick, and the muddled payoff is not entirely satisfying. Even so, I was grateful that someone is taking lessons from such a good film and that the results are so creative, original, and compelling.