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Friday, April 7, 2006
'Brick' doesn't break the mold; it tries to make a new one
Rian Johnson puts the collected works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in a blender with a splash of teenage melodrama and pours it into a high school mold for "Brick."
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View all photosBrendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, playing it so close to his chest that he's almost unreadable) is Philip Marlowe as a teen loner with a private eye's cool and a cowboy's sense of justice. As much old school as high school, he hangs outside the cliques of his Southern California high school but can spar with them all -- the hipsters, the punks, the vixens, the jocks -- on his own terms. That comes in handy as he investigates the murder of his former girlfriend.
His journey down the mean streets of suburbia and the shadowy halls of higher learning takes him both to the school elite, lorded over by a seductive femme fatale (Nora Zehetner), and the underground drug trade. The latter is ruled by the weird, weaselly, twentysomething drug lord The Pin (Lukas Haas), a junior-league villain with a limp, a cane and a doting mom who pours him juice before his high-level negotiations from his suburban home's basement office.
"Brick" is utterly contrived, especially the too-smart dialogue, and makes no apologies for it. Johnson doesn't play it for laughs, but there is a knowing humor in the way he toys with crime-movie iconography, from stylized jargon equal parts hard-boiled metaphor and imaginary teenage slang to the tract home and soccer-mom milieu.
Sure, many in the supporting cast never quite break out of their self-conscious poses -- they are amateur versions of cocktail-hour sophistication and affected tough-guy attitude -- but the concept is clever and Johnson's brisk editing, dynamic camerawork and snazzy transitions has fun with it all. It makes for an inspired time-warped teenage film noir.
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