The Film Noir Odyssey
Writer/Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Noah Fleiss, Meagan Good, Emilie de Ravin, Lukas Haas
Cinematography: Steve Yedlin
Music: Nathan Johnson
Studio: Focus Features
Release: April 7, 2006
“Brick” is a fascinating, mostly successful, experiment in filmmaking that feels like it could have been born from the premise of a silly SNL sketch: turns out high school has life-and-death stakes in it. This merging of the high school drama with the classic noir genre could have gone wrong in a thousand ways, and it’s a credit to first-time writer/director Rian Johnson (“Knives Out”) that it only goes wrong in a couple minor ones.
Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a stand-in for our classic private detective character, recently heartbroken by his drug addict girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin). When he receives a note to go to a pay-phone, he gets a panicked call from her where she begs him for help, along with a few confusing words and phrases like “bad brick.” Soon enough, Brendan discovers Emily’s dead body outside a sewer tunnel… then hides it so he can figure out who murdered her himself. The suspects are many, and each represents a “type” from classic noir: the femme fatale Laura (Nora Zehetner), the mysterious ex-girlfriend Kara (Meagan Good), the seeming taskmaster “The Pin” (Lukas Haas), the blunt object Tugger (Noah Fleiss), and the angry Vice Principal (Richard Roundtree). After days of investigation, Brendan figures out that the bad brick was a reference to a cocaine block, but by this point his life is legitimately in danger thanks to someone close to him.
The plot is very complex, but not in a bad way. Every scene makes sense while you are watching it, and after the film is over, one of its pleasures is that you attempt to untangle each motive, double-cross and lie… only to find that Johnson did play fair all the way through. But that’s not the point and purpose of the film. It’s all about the style, and immersing the viewer in the world of a ‘40s noir… one that is set in a California high school. The smartest thing that Johnson does is that he never for a single moment allows a character to break or wink at the audience, even when members of the ensemble have to go big or melodramatic. Because of that, the viewer remains under the filmmaker’s spell for the entirety of the running time. It adds to the humor of certain scenes, like where Johnson stages Brendan being disciplined by the Vice-Principal exactly as if he was a cop yelling at a private detective. But it also adds to the intensity of certain scenes, most notably a stand-off at the edge of the sewer tunnel where guns come into play and a character dies in a terrible way.
Still, this very stylized manner does keep the viewer emotionally detached from the proceedings, watching the film rather than experiencing it. There’s one incredible scene where Brendan breaks down with grief over Emily’s death, and it’s the best in the film and the only one that guts you emotionally. I wanted more of that, even with the hardboiled dialogue. If the final scene between Emily and Brendan, where she tells him to leave her alone, had teemed with that same emotion? It would have hooked the viewer much sooner and kept them feeling for the characters all the way through. The other problem is that some of the ensemble simply can’t handle the dialogue as well as others, but more on them later.
While Johnson keeps the dialogue firmly set in the ‘40s, visually he’s much more keen to experiment. And this seems like a smart decision – if he had mimicked the style of noir visually or shot things in black-and-white, it would have been a step too far. Certain scenes and shots, like the aforementioned killing in the tunnel, give a sneak preview of how Johnson and his longtime cinematographer Steve Yedlin (“Knives Out”) would hone their talents into some of the best-looking films of the decade – look no further than “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” for proof of this. Others, like fish-angle lenses during chases and awkward impressionistic plastic bags leaping for camera, work less well.
Gordon-Levitt does an incredible job leading the film, and without his performance, the entire thing would have imploded. Some of the ensemble, like Haas and Good, hit just the right notes. But others, in particular Zehetner and Noah Segan, feel like kids mimicking adults, which breaks the spell for viewers. Both would turn into better actors as their careers progressed, but their work here doesn’t quite cut it. It’s especially a shame for Zehetner (Good would have been much better in the part), since hers is the second-most important character in the film next to Gordon-Levitt.
I like “Brick” a lot, and watching the movie for the first time in years, I was stunned at how many of the cast and crew Johnson would re-use in his subsequent films. In many ways, this was a summer stock show for most of the filmmakers – a grand production that was made with few resources and a lot of chutzpah which must have bonded them as family. It’s a pretty good high school movie, a very good noir and also the beginning of a master filmmaker taking his first steps towards greatness.
Score: ****