Brick
Written and directed by Rian Johnson
Rated R: for violence and drug content
The camera pans across a small stream flowing over a cement sewer floor towards a pair of feat covered in brown shoes. Then the camera focuses in on a close-up shot of our protagonist’s dark, foreboding eyes that are covered by thick strands of brown hair. These eyes have already seen some strange things 30 seconds in to the film, as the following wide shot sets up what will propel our hero to spiral down a murky underworld of drugs and violence and other things that shouldn’t concern high school kids these days.
Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is staring at a dead body on the sewer floor. The body is that of a young, blonde-haired girl lying next to a stream. Our hero gazes at the body in a saddened state of disbelief as we see the first of many fantastic shots to come: a lifeless arm (that of the dead girl) spread across the stream as the water trickles through her inert fingers. Noticeably on the wrist of said hand are five blue bracelets that seem to be telling us something. Are these bracelets—set up prominently in the middle of the frame—a metaphor for the weight and guilt of this dead girl and the inescapable events that follow the rest of the film?
Cut to the next shot and we see this same arm (and subsequent blue bracelets) dropping a note in a locker. The screen cuts to black as the title card appears in bold, white lettering: Brick. The next shot starts low as the camera focuses in on our hero’s brown shoes walking toward his locker. The words “two days previous” appear on the screen in a bit of Tarantino-esque narrative-rearranging.
Writer/director Rian Johnson wants us to know immediately in his debut feature that this is going to be a noir-styled, “detective movie” (as it is referred to on the cover of the DVD), and our hero will set out to find the murderer of the girl.
Welcome to the world of Brick, the best American feature debut since Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko. The film manages to grab your attention immediately and rarely lets loose its strong grip on the imagination. This is a crowning independent work of an inspired, first time American writer/director.
Brick is the kind of film that creates its own world, one that is slightly off-kilter and stylized in such a way that it seems completely unique, but somehow remains rooted in a sense of reality. Watching this kind of film is a rewarding experience when done well (as it is here) as any movie fan loves to escape into a world not like the one we all live in.
Johnson explains in the his introduction of the deleted scenes (there are more than 20 minutes of extended and deleted scenes in the DVD’s special features section) that he was inspired by the works of writer Dashiell Hammett, who’s “hard-boiled” detective novels of the 20s and 30s included The Maltese Falcon. Johnson further explains in the special features that Hammett had a style of writing dialogue in which the characters spoke by saying as much the most information with as few words as possible.
Johnson uses that style to create some of the best, and most original, dialogue ever to hit the screen. His script is filled with colloquial terms that the characters use to speak in a way that is unlike anything ever heard in the movies today. The characters call cops “bulls” and have countless other slang that refers to people and things in this movie’s world.
The film is about our main character, Brendan (played with confident perfection by look-at-him-now Joseph Gordon-Levitt), trying to solve the murder of his ex-girlfriend Emily. The setting is San Clemente High School, where the students amass in cliques that are more interested in drug-dealing, violence and the like than in going to senior prom. The world of movie high schools has never been so cool and darkly disturbing as it is in Brick.
With countless memorable characters (with names like the Pin, Tug, Brain,etc.), unforgettable dialogue, and a twist-filled, whodunit plot that never slows down right up to the final minutes, Brick is a film that’s destined to be appreciated by cinephiles from the start, and later discovered by mass audiences through word-of-mouth. This film is what independent moviemaking is all about: low-budget, do-it-yourself filmmaking (apparently Johnson edited the entire film on his home computer using digital filmmaking) that looks and sounds better than most big-budget movies we’re spoon-fed at the multiplex these days.
Released on DVD August 8, Brick is already one of the best films of the year, and even one of the best films of the decade. I eagerly wait to see what Johnson does next, as he is now a young, talented director to watch. Levitt also puts forth his best performance to date, and creates a character that is so cool and smart you wish you could be like him.
Go out discover Brick if you’re looking for something different from the normal cinematic choices. It’s a film that deserves to be seen by many, as well as a film that requires repeated viewings to fully grasp everything that is going on in the story.
HDFEST grading scale
-Brick-
Story A
Acting A
Visuals A+
Originality A+
Enjoyability A
Overall Grade A
DVD Extras B
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