Not another teen noir mystery movie.
Americans may not live in an empire, or even an axis, of evil-or so we've been told-but we sure do have a taste for the stuff. Ruthlessly unpredictable gangsters, deranged child rapists and cannibalistic serial killers fill screens, both large and small. Given this glut, it helps to have a sense of humor when foraying into our subconscious underworld.
First-time writer-director Rian Johnson's
Brick
opens with a snippet of spaghetti-Western music, an ironic
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device often used in movies that transplant stark tales of good and
evil to everyday suburban climes. This is not the film's only neo-noir cliché, but it quickly becomes hard to keep track of-or care about-such infractions.
Brick
's modern-high-school translation of Dashiell Hammett is simply too much fun. Opening with a deeply alienated teenager, Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), contemplating a blonde corpse in a storm sewer, may seem too heavy-or too familiar. But once
Brick
kicks into gear, it never falters.
The dead girl, Emily (Emilie de Ravin), is the principal source of Brendan's alienation. He's been eating lunch alone ever since she broke up with him, seduced not by another guy but by the lure of drugs. The film slips into flashback to reveal that Emily called Brendan just before she disappeared, asking for help. Solving the mystery requires talking with two clearly fatal femmes, Laura (Nora Zehetner) and Kara (Meagan Good), and ultimately infiltrating the drug gang led by the Pin (Lukas Haas), a cape-wearing, cane-flourishing dandy.
Brendan is no Superman, although instinctively he is. He deciphers the myriad conspiracies of his
school-a place so tough that the peace-keeping assistant vice principal is
Richard "Shaft" Roundtree-and
he plays the bad guys like chumps. It's only the bad gals that,
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in classic noir fashion, Brendan can't quite handle.
If Good is playing an intentionally over-the-top role, the wonder of Gordon-Levitt's Brendan is that he seems entirely natural. Always in a spotless white T-shirt and spouting tough-guy dialogue that he renders as dramatically credible as it is conceptually absurd, he's a classic loner in a world where it's every kid for himself. If the notion that Brendan is all alone in the world is a narcissistic fantasy, it's one that nearly every middle-class adolescent has indulged at one time or another.
What carries
Brick
is unassailable confidence, a canny sense of style and expert timing. Using stylish but not too showy dissolves, jump cuts, and wide-angle shots, the director evokes John Huston, Jean-Luc Godard and John Hughes without resorting to slavish imitation, let alone parody. Although
Brick
doesn't come out of nowhere, it does end up in a class of its own.
