Brick
reviewed by Sam Osborn rating: 4 out of 4
At Sundance 2005, Brick won a Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision. And now that the film has finally rippled its way to my neck of the woods, I can only say that the award was an understatement. Brick is something different. It's something more. Ebert wrote that when he first saw Bonnie & Clyde, after critiquing films for a little over six months that he "felt an exhilaration beyond describing. I did not suspect how long it would be between such experiences, but at least I learned that they were possible." It's been a while, yeah, but Brick is one of those rare experiences.
It focuses on a strange, hormonal underworld so young that being "old" means turning 26. Our lonesome anti-hero is Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and the dead girl whose fingers brush the water of a high school drainpipe is Emily (Emilie de Ravin), Brendan's old flame. It opens with her corpse, Brendan seething a few feet away, alerting us quick that Brick is no teeny-bopper melodrama.
We cut back "Two Days Previous" to where Emily slips a primly folded note into the slit of Brendan's locker, directing him to an intersection pay phone at four o'clock. The phone rings and Emily's voice is shattered into frenzied whimpers, babbling about tugs, pins, bricks and Poor Frisco; part of the characters' made-up slang (think a light version of A Clockwork Orange's dialect). Emily asks for Brendan's help, but as a car drives by, a cigarette butt flicked from its open window, she screams and the line is cut. From there, it's detective work for our Brendan. He maneuvers about his connections with the school's "Upper Crust" (the popular crowd), trying to get the lowdown on what his informant, The Brain (Matt O'Leary), calls their "Shady Deeds". He knows Emily, his first love, has gotten herself mixed up in an underworld she wasn't made for, but nobody seems to want Brendan involved. And when her corpse finally shows in the drainpipe, Brendan's already too wrapped up to let her go.
Every nut, bolt, and washer of Brick's architecture breathes the Film Noir genre, only translated to teenage modernity. And despite, the nutty premise of a teenage underworld, Writer/Director Rian Johnson approaches the material with complete solemnity. Emotions are most potent and wild in our ages of adolescence, often banking and skidding on the pot-holed road of first loves and deceit. And so Johnson bottles this hormonal lightning and stirs in an angry flurry of underworld overtones that turn dark as blood at the bat of seductress' eyelash.
But the story isn't without its humility. In one scene, the drug lord has a sit-down with Brendan upstairs in his mother's kitchen. The mother fiddles about the refrigerator, sweetly asking whether Brendan would like orange juice, milk, or apple juice with his cereal. "Water's fine, ma'am, thanks." She smiles and pours him a "country style" apple juice, kisses her drug lord son on the head and strolls to another room. Our two players stare at each other, waiting for the moment of humility to pass, and then launch back into business. There are only two adults to be seen in the entire film. Youth is king, and everyone knows it. The beauty of Brick is that Rian Johnson even gets us to believe it too.
But with this youth comes a dialect. At first reminding us of the hipster talk from Guy Ritchie films (Snatch, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) where the complexity of the plot isn't aided by a weak understanding of the dialect. But Johnson's language isn't a cheap trick of word play. It's not spoken with sloping valleys and peaks of inflection, and the actors don't pretend it's ordinary business speaking this way. Rian Johnson writes the words to be read like Shakespeare; and, in their own jauntily urban way, it comes off like smoky poetry.
Brick is a film that could be great with half of what it's already got. But a top-notch cinematographer, a knockout soundtrack, and a flooring performance from a small-name cast never hurts. It was the film's conviction that hooked me, though; its sickly sweet belief in the chaos of adolescence and cold, stubborn lock to Noir that it latches onto. Like nothing else I've experienced, Brick held me.
