Chinatown's Teenage Lovechild

Brick

Day 26

Film 24

Brick is an exciting piece of cinema fusing together noir with a high school drama. It does not sound like it would work, and it does not 100% of the time but in the few times where the idea stumbles it catches itself by never letting the tension drop.

Brick begins with Brendan Frye (Gordon-Levitt) staring at his dead ex, Emily (Ravin,) at the bottom of a sewer drain. The movie flashes back to the days before her death and is propelled by this first scene as we try to piece together the mystery along side Brendan. What starts as a edgy teenage drama quickly turns into a noir film as Brendan smooth talks and fights his way through a cast of characters that are as much noir as high school.

The pace does not let up, we meet Emily right before she is killed. After that Brendan turns from a man searching for answers into a single minded beast ready to do anything to get the truth. This means walking into the basement of a drug lord, dodging murder accusations and fighting with the school administration while still asking questions. It leads up to a spectacular few scenes at the end.

The only hole I can find in Brick is the fact that it is a noir story set on a high school campus. There are a couple scenes where it just does not quite work. The interesting thing about these scenes is that when they do not work perfectly you are not jarred from the movie. These quirks become hilarious lines caught that break the tension of the frantic story. When the dialogue, which is almost Shakespearean in complexity, stumbles it shifts from barely able to follow to amazingly understandable. It is strange, but I think Johnson wanted it like that. It forms a give and take relationship between accessibility and perfection.

I loved Brick. It does a spectacular job dancing around with two orthogonal genres. It keeps you entertained in a way only noir can.