Andy Ryan
When the gangsters are having milk and cookies at their mum’s house, Brick—writer-director Rian Johnson’s now twenty-year old debut—is inviting you to laugh at a film noir set in an American high school. Most of the time, it asks you to believe in it.
Johnson, whose work now ranks him among the best crime-film directors, initially wanted to make Brick because of his love of the work of Dashiell Hammett. But his ingenuity and teenage memories led him to create a film linked to but not of that world. Brick‘s triumph isn’t just that it succeeds in taking this old genre somewhere new but that it both pays homage to and reinvigorates that old genre. It achieves this through its inventive use of setting, language and cast and with each, the traditions of the genre are respected but refreshed and given a new life beyond the mid-twentieth century. The concept sounds like a stretch, a discarded scrap from a desperate scriptwriter’s notebook. But you believe because Johnson and his cast are fully committed to this world in which a teenage private eye isn’t keen to “tip the Bulls”.
High school is the perfect setting for a world of gangs, manipulation, and brittle egos. Roles from the different worlds combine neatly, such as Laura (Nora Zehetner) being both queen bee and femme fatale. If you’re already fond of the film noir classics, you’ll enjoy the knowing winks to them. If you’re not, Brick nudges you to go and discover them.
Youth on film is often carefree, a time for fun, exploring and sometimes just drifting, before the responsibilities of adulthood take over. In Brick, youth comes with stakes so high that several of the characters end up dead. There’s little room for exploring when a misstep is fatal. When Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the sleuth determined to find out who killed his ex Emily (Emilie de Ravin), speaks of “the folly of youth”, he means someone else’s folly. He’s a schoolboy with the world weary air of a hardened PI. It works because cynicism doesn’t need decades of experience but can come from adolescent alienation, that belief that adults have built the world wrong, now you have to live in it and only you see how bleak it all is. Brendan’s misery occasionally verges on parody but then seeing the worst in everyone serves him well in his quest to work out what’s really going on.
Gordon-Levitt’s Brendan has the poise of Sam Spade but the hands-plunged-in-hoodie-pockets awkwardness of a teenager. They sound incompatible but in Gordon-Levitt’s relentless performance, this tension is part of the struggle of growing up and his cool exterior is more interesting when you see the unease that it hides. The poise includes being able to take a punch but Brendan pays for every one, the cost cut into his face. This isn’t Bugsy Malone, the guns aren’t loaded with cream.
In Brick, you “take a powder”, “shine a blade” and “find some yeg to pin it on” and yet the viewer never feels lost. The vast majority of this slang is taken from film noir classics and should feel dated and absurd when spoken by a cast of millennial students. Instead, it’s a perfect fit. Youth is when experimenting with language and having a vocabulary that others (particularly adults) don’t get is a special source of fun and pride. The film doesn’t dabble but goes all in and because you’re immersed, it soon feels natural. It helps that the actors relish every line. Johnson said one of the great advantages of working with a relatively novice cast was not having to manage impossible celebrity schedules and therefore having lots of time to rehearse. He would get the whole cast over to his home and they would endlessly drill the lines so that the actors knew them “like muscle memory”.
Like The Maltese Falcon in San Francisco and The Big Sleep in LA, Brick is a Californian story. Unlike them, it’s set in a small town. San Clemente (population of 60,000) was where Johnson grew up and he was filming at his high school just a few years after he was studying there. He perfectly captures that intense cliquey atmosphere because it was fresh in his mind and he was plotting the scenes on home turf. The students are able to run around uninhibited by others, in a way that wouldn’t feel plausible in a big city. Viewers are forced to take a closer look at the humdrum settings and see the sinister in a concrete drain tunnel and the vastness of a parking lot.
When Brendan’s sidekick The Brain (Matt O’Leary), says of another character, “He’s supposed to be old, like 26”, you’re reminded who this film belongs to. Only two adult characters appear in the the film and both feel like exiles. Assistant Vice Principal Gary Trueman (Richard Roundtree), proudly displaying his nameplate, tries to control Brendan and they clash in an entertaining but peripheral scene. The story needs Trueman because tying up the plot needs an authority figure who could bring the villain to justice. But once Trueman has been introduced we get back to the young and where the action is.
Then there’s The Pin’s Mum (Reedy Gibbs). She’s the exhausting host who turns getting Brendan a drink into a saga during his summit with The Pin (Lukas Haas) and Tug (Noah Fleiss), the criminal mastermind and his muscle. She gets a kiss from her son and then awkwardly declares that she’s “going to go do something in the other room”. In Brick, the adult gets out of the way so the kids can talk business. She doesn’t speak again but appears for a few seconds near the finale to pour a glass of milk. So her contribution is juice, milk and a thought that must pop into the viewer’s mind when The Pin faces his reckoning: his mum is upstairs.
Two decades on from Brick, Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man is out in cinemas, the third instalment in the Knives Out series. After his brief detour into the Star Wars universe, mystery remains his true love. His latest film’s $150 million budget is over three hundred times what he had to make his first, but Brick wouldn’t have been better for more money. It would have been tempting to have more dramatic settings but that would come at the cost of the film’s ingenious use of the everyday. He could have afforded more high spec action sequences, losing some of the gritty low key violence that punctuates the plot. His brother Nathan’s beautiful and unnerving soundtrack might have been diluted by the purchase of some big name songs. Johnson describes being “so much in our own heads, just trying to make something that made sense to all of us and that we would all like”. That confidence to follow his vision rather than the needs of an imagined audience didn’t need big money.
Brick proved a mighty springboard for both Johnson and Gordon-Levitt. It’s loved but it’s perhaps a little surprising that their success hasn’t led to it being better known. Those discovering it now have the added pleasure of watching it as a time capsule, where teenagers without social media have to go to the payphone to make a call. Revisiting the film in the age of streaming, Brick seems ripe to remade as a series. I’m sure it would be fun, weaving the intricate plot over a few episodes and having the time to deepen the characters. It would, however, lose the tautness and sense of urgency that make it gripping.
Two decades old and Brick still feels bold and experimental. It’s thrilling proof that innovation can be rooted in what’s come before and that a director can pull off the improbable when they stick to their guns. Heartening lessons at a time when swathes of the film world can feel stuck in a cycle of cautious repetition.
When I watched Brick for the first time, I was the same age as most of the characters. They were aspirational and impossibly cool. Twenty years on, I want to put an arm around these anxious and confused souls. Brendan finds out what happened to Emily but the truth takes him even further from any sort of peace. We leave him walking off that football field, alone.
