Brick, a low-budget debut feature by writer-director Rian Johnson, won a special jury prize at last year’s Sundance film festival for “originality of vision,” though that may say less about his movie than about what passes for originality in the movie business these days. Planned for seven years, shot in 20 days, and edited by the filmmaker on his home computer, the movie meticulously re-creates Dashiell Hammett’s brand of noir at a modern SoCal high school, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a teenage gumshoe trying to unravel the mysterious disappearance of his ex-girlfriend. Neither the choice of source material nor the idea of transplanting classic literature to a high school setting is particularly innovative, yet there’s no denying that Brick is weirdly expressive, often when it seems most artificial. What begins as the most gimmicky sort of genre retread somehow evolves into that most elusive of films: a personal statement.
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Like most small movies, Brick opened in New York before arriving here, and early reviews suggest that neither its fans nor its detractors are inclined to take it too seriously. Stephen Holden, writing in the New York Times, panned the movie as a “flashy cinematic stunt” and compared it unfavorably to Alan Parker’s 1976 kiddie-gangster musical Bugsy Malone. In the New Yorker David Denby called it one of the year’s most entertaining movies but seemed to share Holden’s view of it as a game of dress up (“Part of the enjoyment is our knowledge that Brick was concocted by Hollywood kids on a serious lark, making use of a glorious strand of their inheritance”). Neither writer was willing to set aside his condescension long enough to consider that Brick might strike a chord with teenagers that he can no longer hear. High school may not be a shadowy world of moral anarchy and ruthless power relationships, of clueless authorities and back-alley punishments, but it can sure feel that way when you’re there.
Neither the leathery dialogue nor the run-down settings would matter if Johnson hadn’t so perfectly transposed Hammett’s heartless criminal underworld to the shark-infested waters of high school, where the shifting tides of popularity can turn a friend into an enemy overnight. Brendan (Gordon-Levitt), the steely hero of Brick, is a sort of teenage Sam Spade, a loner who looks out for number one and survives by avoiding entanglements. But Emily (Emilie de Ravin), his ex-girlfriend, lacks Brendan’s sangfroid and has begun to climb the social ladder by attaching herself to a haughty cheerleader (Nora Zehetner). After a panicked phone call to Brendan, Emily vanishes without a trace, and before long he begins to suspect that she’s gotten in over her head with the muscle-bound Tugger (Noah Fleiss) and his secret employer, a heroin dealer known only as the Pin (Lukas Haas).
Directed and written by Rian Johnson
With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, Noah Fleiss, Matt O’Leary, Emilie de Ravin, Noah Segan, and Richard Roundtree.
