Roger Ebert opens his review of Rian Johnson’s debut feature Brick (2005) with the following quote from Elaine May’s A New Leaf: “You have preserved in your own lifetime, sir, a way of life that was dead before you were born.” The line is more than appropriate, considering Brick is, in a surprisingly straightfaced manner, carrying on in its own lifetime a style of film that was dead long before it was born. At the same time, the depth of feeling and sincerity that runs through the film makes it seem utterly, breathlessly alive. In part nostalgic for a time and a style long passed, in part playing with and updating the conventions of the classic noir, Johnson’s film transposes the snaking plots and sneaky moods of gritty detective fiction to a contemporary high school—90210 goes noir, or what we would imagine a David Lynch or Coen brothers reimagining of Heathers might look like.
The movie, which hums with
constant menace and sparks with hipster slang, was awarded the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision in 2005—and,
whether or not you can take its premise seriously, there is no denying it is a
work of originality and vision. Brick
is an intriguing experiment in determination that unashamedly demands your
attention, “one of those movies than seems not made but born—a small
masterpiece that’s perfectly strange and strangely perfect” (Patterson). The combination is surprising, but what is
even more surprising is the extent to which it works. The question begs to be
raised, why is the Hammet-Chandler school so readily compatible with actual
school?
The film starts with the hero, high school loner Brendan, finding the
body of a former girlfriend discarded in a drainage ditch—shades of Chinatown and Twin Peaks—as distant footsteps announce the possible killer, or
perhaps merely a witness, running away. In flashback, we see Emily, the girl,
had asked Brendan for his help two days prior to her murder, then disappeared.
These are the facts available to the protagonist when he turns into a typical
1930s gumshoe, singling out potential players in the crime as he retraces the
steps of the victim straight into a web of drugs, death, and deceit that lurks
just beneath the surface of this sunny Southern California suburb. Like the best noirs, Brick isn’t about the resolution to the
murder making logical sense as much as it is about it making sense to the
characters, and about the atmosphere, the situations, and the mannered behavior
and language of these characters.
From the hipster slang of 1950s and ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll movies to the
elaborate argot deployed by Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange,
cinema has made frequent use of colloquial language to illustrate the
separation of adolescents from the grown-up world, and Brick fits nicely—if somewhat unexpectedly—into that long
tradition, except now it’s kids playing at hard-edged, grownup chatter. As Todd
McCarthy points out in his review, it is at first “mildly disconcerting to hear
’30s slang (‘Why’d you take a powder the other night?’) and recycled detective
dialogue being spouted by casual-looking California teenagers… [but]
eventually, the mode of delivery becomes downright refreshing, as it forces the
kids to speak in crisp, precise and extremely articulate complete sentences.” With a few notable exceptions—such as when
the main character barks a hardboiled speech to the vice principal (“No
more of these informal chats! If you have a disciplinary issue with me, write
me up or suspend me.”) and ends with, “Otherwise, I’ll see you at the parent
conference” or when the threat of drug ring violence is temporarily abated by
an impervious mom fussing around junior murderers and thugs with corn flakes
and country-style apple juice—Brick
places words that seem to flow directly from pulp pages into the mouths of
high-schoolers entirely without mockery or condescension. When the main
character confronts a gang of stoners (“I got all five senses and I slept last
night. That puts me six up on the lot of you.)” or, directly quoting Bogart’s
Sam Spade, stands up to his teenage femme fatale (“Now you are dangerous.”), he doesn’t act as if he thinks his
behavior is funny or out of place. While the director and the audience are
fully, humorously aware of the contrivance of children spouting Chandleresque
vernacular in clipped, over-determined cadence, the actors inhabit the
hyperbolic world Johnson creates without feeling the need to wink at the
audience or place their tongues in their cheeks.
“Lunch,” one of Johnson’s teenage character muses, “lunch is a lot of
things; lunch is difficult.” On its face, the line skirts self-parody, but
seeing dewy young actors striking the poses of hardboiled demimondaines,
desperadoes and dolls got me thinking about the unexpected ways these
(seemingly) most incompatible of genres—the noir and the high school teen
comedy—can share common ground. As Troy Patterson observes in his review,
“given the deep alienation, byzantine intrigues, and odd alliances on offer
during your average high-school lunch period, it’s an ideal setting for a
noir.”
This kind of story, even when it plays out not in the nighttime big
city of Hollywood’s imagination, but in high school parking lots under the
preposterously sunny skies, against the wide-open spaces of San Clemente, still
works because it has an unshakeable internal logic. The knight in shining armor
must walk down these mean streets; he must act like a criminal, enter the
underworld, get himself beaten up, outsmart everyone, and, finally, give us the
pleasures of sin and of justice at the same time. It’s not coincidental that
all of this sounds a bit like coming of age in—and surviving—high school, a
world similarly governed by its own logic (Segal). “I was inspired to do a
detective movie in a surprising environment, somewhere you couldn’t just lean
back on your preconceptions about men wearing hats,” Johnson said in an
interview. “It occurred to me that the criminal underworld is a microcosm unto
itself, where everything is about the social caste system. Well, that describes
high school exactly” (qtd. in Clarke).
To begin with, the high school movie’s cast of characters is in no way
less archetypal or hermetic than that of film noir, and Brick expertly navigates the connections, similarities and
substitutions. One by one, Johnson ticks off the character types we’ve come to
expect in noir; what struck me is the extent to which these fit the character
types we expect in teen pics: the innocent, insecure girl in need of
protection; a series of dippy dames, perennially in costume for the school
plays, the band of popular girls at school that in classic noir would have been
golddiggers, nightclub singers or bar-flies; the school principal, a
well-meaning but oblivious representative of official authority embodied by the
police chief in old private eye films; a mysterious, eccentric crime lord
(complete with a cape, a limp, and a cane with an imitation duck’s head on its
handle) known as the Pin and his band of apish enforcers, here a curious mix of
jocks and stoners; and the detective’s quiet but capable helper, an extra set
of eyes and ears that might have been an informant, bookie or newspaperman in
the forties but here is a nerd that seems to permanently lean against the back
wall of the school, seeing and hearing everything without ever getting noticed.
But it’s the world-weary, wise-cracking Brendan himself, played by
Joseph Gordon-Levitt with a tenacious scowl and superlative slouch, that
cinches the connection between hardboiled and highs school. The typical alienated
teen, a loner and an outsider, was never far off from the private eye in early
noirs; they are both romantic heroes with a personal ethical code and an unwavering
moral compass.
The gumshoe’s disgust in the face of spiraling moral turpitude is
blended, in Brendan, with the adolescent’s fear of growing up and joining the
corrupt world of adults, and the resulting mix makes for sympathy more often
than hilarity. Brick, through the
circumlocution of noir cliché, foregrounds the strange, artificial atmosphere
that permeates all school hallways and classrooms (D’Angelo 59). The situations
and the talk in the film may be a joke, but the emotions are real—“we’re in
high school, where friendships and loyalty, and who’s tough and who’s cool,
count for everything” (Denby 89)
In the end, the film is too sensitive and perfectly attuned to the
self-enclosed, self-regulating society occupied by teenagers to be passed over
as an emptied out stylization or postmodern pastiche. What it borrows from noir is not simply a set of conventions, but
a sense of obsessiveness, solemnity and encroaching social breakdown. The film
uses its melodramatic plot to replicate the life-or-death significance and
angst that characterizes subjective adolescent experience. There’s something
almost unbearably poignant about the sense of grim purpose that envelopes the
movie, about its juxtaposition of the byzantine codes of pulp fiction and the
question of where to sit at lunch. Johnson, who started writing the screenplay
for Brick when he was still in high
school, has made a rare movie, one willing to acknowledge that life never seems
more momentous, perplexing, and fraught with danger than it does at 17.
Bibliography
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D’Angelo, Mike. “Clique Clique, Bangbang.” Esquire 145.4 (2006):
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Denby, David. “Tobacco and Drugs.” New Yorker 82.7 (2006):
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Ebert, Roger. “Brick.” Rogerebert.com,
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(2006): 48. LiteraryReference Center. Web. 19 Mar. 2015.
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