Brick (Rian Johnson, 2005)
Brick is a weird little thing, a teen movie crime mystery where people speak slightly updated forties lingo, and the main character, a quiet loner, takes on aspects of the Man with No Name from Leone’s Dollars trilogy.
Yeah, it’s weird. What’s weirder is that it works really well. Brendan gets a call from his ex girlfriend, Emily, where she asks him to help her, and then hangs up as if she’s scared of something. A while later, she’s dead, and he’s infiltrating a drug ring to find out who and what killed her. His advantages are that he’s smarter than most, and that he’s a little nuts, totally fearless and uninhibited, and not afraid to get violent. He doesn’t mind manipulating people to get what he wants, either, all in keeping with the noir antihero.
That’s a pretty standard noir setup, but the characters are mostly high-schoolers (except for the Assistant VP, played by Richard Roundtree, of all people, who stands in for the stock noir police detective who thinks the main character is useful, but untrustworthy). The result is odd, a lot of the humor (and the movie is quite funny at times) stems from breaking the tone of the hard-boiled crime drama when parents pop their heads in and serve the kids some apple juice, or make small talk.
In general, though, it’s the teenagers who rule this movie’s world, and they’re just as ruthless and manipulative as you might expect from a noir movie. The plot isn’t amazingly complex, but it’s good enough to keep your interest. What really sets the movie apart is the acting, especially Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brendan, and, most of all, the dialogue. It’s modern enough to not sound weird, but it has some 40s slang thrown in, which works surprisingly well, but the great thing about it is the rhythm. It’s a sort of clipped, truncated, hyper-realist version of how people really talk, minimalist, but with a jazzy rhythm, like David Mamet writing noir. I really, really loved it, so much that even though I enjoyed the action sequences, I found myself waiting for another scene of dialogue between Brendan and his nerdy sidekick Brain.
Of course, our hero doesn’t really get what he wants, but he gets even, and is left with nothing more than he started with, except perhaps for a sense of having done the right thing. Antiheroes can’t end up happy, that’s just the way the story goes, and Brendan seems to be aware of it, and accepting it stoically, in the end. The movie is very recommended, especially if you’re interested in what can be done by a first-time director on a modest budget, as long as the script is well-written.