A damsel calls up a former paramour to sob in distress. She’s fallen in with a bad crowd and she’s in a real heap of trouble. Later, when said ex finds the girl’s body abandoned in a sewage tunnel, he doggedly pursues those responsible, insinuating himself into impolite society, playing seedy characters off against one another with convoluted machinations rarely demonstrated on screen since The Maltese Falcon. But what happens in the playground stays in the playground.
Now here’s something you don’t happen upon everyday. Rian Johnson’s sui generis debut feature, a high school noir of all things, took a Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at Sundance. All told, the writer-director spent six years getting Brick into a cinema near you, and no wonder. Potential investors must have thought him quite mad.
Transporting the hard-bitten quips of Dashiell Hammett and archaic existential mores of Nicholas Ray into a contemporary south Californian setting replete with cheerleaders and geeks, this audacious feature ought to play like an extended groaning joke. Instead, Johnson exploits the jaded overlap between the outsider teen and classic Bogart to fashion a weirdly brilliant accomplishment to fit snugly between indie stormers Donnie Darko and Primer.
Like his 1940s antecedents, the bespectacled hero Brendan (Gordon-Levitt) is in a lonely place, working all the angles in an underworld of femme fatales, thugs, hop-heads and gang bosses. He sasses officials, notably Richard Roundtree’s vice-principal, while keeping them onside - “I gave you Jared to see him eaten,” snaps the youthful shamus. “Not to see you fed.”
The eccentric hybrid patois form a language of their own. The classical gumshoe swipes (“Still picking your teeth with freshmen?” Brendan asks the school’s drama vamp) and archer-than-thou droogish speak can be borderline impenetrable. But like reading Finnegans Wake or hanging out with a much cooler clique, when scat phrases like “reef worms” or “bulls would only gum it” go whooshing over the head, you’re perfectly happy to go along for the ride.
Shot on 35mm for $500,000 and edited on a home computer, the filmmaker’s visual flourishes and perfect action reflexes completely eclipse the minimal resources. Every punch or knife-fight carries a signature flourish. Every chase is gaspingly presented. The glare and grain, common to the lo-fi sector, are put firmly in service of the angsty milieu.
Like finding yourself at the centre of a Bermuda Triangle with points at Chinatown, Blue Velvet and Bugsy Malone, we can’t always be sure what’s going on with Brick, but hell, a free trip is a free trip.