Brick
is an experiment in cinematic style that’s success or failure will depend
entirely on the a film-goers willingness to give themselves over to director Rian
Johnson’s vision. The film scores big points in the areas of originality,
faith in the intelligence of film lovers, and one giant juxtaposition of wildly
disparate genres. Brick will most certainly polarize those who see it into two
vastly divergent camps, those who buy into and are in thrall of it’s pioneering
spirit and those who see it as ridiculous pretension and close themselves off.
In the screening I attended I counted seven people who walked out, which is particularly
telling in that the film contains nothing that’s inordinately profane or
offensive - those who walked were clearly of the opinion that Brick sucked and
are unwilling to waste any further time. Similarly in the group who accompanied
me to the theater, two loved it and two hated it, period.
So
what is all this Brick business? Johnson takes a hyper-film noir style - think
Dashiell Hammett heavily laden with Damon Runyan-esque dick-speak) and applies
it to a story about love, death, fear and loathing at a rich-kid California High
School. We begin with Brendon Frye (Third Rock’s Joseph Gordon-Leavitt) staring
balefully at the lifeless body of his ex-girlfriend (Lost’s Emilie De Ravin)
for whom he still carries a torch. She is sprawled at the mouth of a large, arching
culvert that Frye carries her body into - hiding her in order to buy a few days
with which he might effect an investigation designed to uncover her killer(s).
Gordon-Leavitt does a convincing job of carrying the film as it’s dark, avenging
protagonist - grim and emotionless he goes about his plan with a matter-of-factness
somewhat remindful of Mel Gibson in Payback.
It’s
not until we meet “the Brain” (Matt O’ Leary) Frye’s lone
confidante, that we get a feel for the true nature of Johnson’s “experimental
journey.” As Frye fills the Brain in on the crime and his intentions to shake
things up to see if the guilty party might fall out, they speak in a language
of rapid-fire shorthand slang that is either going to draw you further in or alienate
you with it’s pretense, or because of it’s difficulty to follow. I was
willing to buy in, because I’m a sucker for originality and I love a challenge,
but by the same token, it’s at this juncture that the second camp will start
with the eye-rolling and the head-scratching.
In
terms of the film’s code-slang lingo, it’s clear that Johnson (who both
wrote and directed Brick) is aspiring to a Shakespearean feel. There’s a
poetry to it, and a similarity in terms of how closely you have to pay attention
to follow what is being said. It also brought to mind the classic ebonics scene
from Airplane where the two blacks need subtitles. If I were Johnson I would take
the opportunity to create a hilarious subtitled version for the DVD release. Stuff
like, “Golly, she stole thousands of dollars worth of heroin from that big
bully, what in the heck was she thinking?”
Frye
proceeds to piece together as many clues as possible and then dives headlong into
the violent drug underground, first sniffing at the periphery, then going right
to the heart of the scene by taking a blindfolded ride to the home of the Kingpin,
or as he’s known “The Pin.” The Pin is effectively portrayed with
a fey aloofness by Lucas Haas (getting a little long in the tooth to pass for
18). He is responsible for the films scant laughs, particularly as we see him
seated in his mobile office - a lounge chair and an end table with a lamp pitching
about in the back of a van. Meanwhile, Haas keeps his cool - legs crossed like
DeNiro as Louis Cypher in Angel Heart.
Brick
is full of plot twists (a few too many for most to follow completely in one sitting)
and Frye pitches the guilt around between several likely suspects, all the while
keeping a preternatural cool as this self-styled, post-Columbine Bladerunner who
never backs down from a sound beating. He gets thrashed as many times as he does
the thrashing, and by the end is worn down to a stumbling coughing shell of a
man-child, by too many beatings and too many missed nights of sleep. By using
the dead girl as bait he contrives to cut a swath through the middle of two rival
gangs that causes them to fall into one another in full-on war.
Frye
escapes the melee, but there’s still one card to play - even if I told you
what it was it wouldn’t spoil anything, in fact the film is so endlessly
convoluted that I doubt it’s possible to spoil it. Whatever you do don’t
go into this film believing the raves, or you’ll be disappointed. Brick is
a film that can be enjoyed under two circumstances: one, you go in with no expectations
and two: you allow yourself to go with the experiment. With it's depiction of
gangsta-cool, amoral, disaffected youth it was something of a cross between 40's
film noir, River's Edge and A Clockwork Orange. I can give it a grudging thumbs
up, but I hope my friends who went with me never read this. I’d never hear
the end of it - they hated it passionately.
