From writer-director Rian Johnson, this low-budget offering comes from a few years back, in 2005. It embodies several things that I tend to appreciate in film: strong, witty, fast dialogue, refusal to rely on effect over acting, and an unwillingness to cater to or patronize the audience. This film demands that you sit up and listen if you want to stay with it - and trust me, you want to stay with it.
At his IMDb page, Johnson is quoted as having said the following:
"Teen movies often have an unspoken underlying premise in which high school is seen as less serious than the adult world. But when your head is encased in that microcosm it's the most serious time of your life."
It's this attitude, carried throughout the film, that appeals so much to me. Too often, movies about (or for) teenagers tend to glamorize that period of life in one of two ways: either you have the Mean Girls effect, where teens generally fall into easily recognizable stereotypes (but don't get me wrong, I love that movie, and I do mean LOVE; it's just doing something else), or you have the coming-of-age effect, where an individual becomes a stronger/better/happier human being (cf. The Karate Kid, An Education). Brick starts at the premise that its characters are already complex individuals, and then, rather than making the film about adolescence, it is a detective story - it just so happens that the PI takes advanced English and the femme fatale is dating the quarterback.
This goes hand-in-hand with the writer's refusal to condescend to the audience. Events aren't recapped, there is hardly any exposition, and no punches are pulled. All of the action is contained in about three days, within which the main character, Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) takes a physical and emotional beating.
Gordon-Levitt said that he took on the role because
Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them. Brick (2005) was a good script just to read. It was like, "Oh my God, these words feel so good in my mouth". A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In Brick (2005), the world is born from the words.For example:
BRENDAN
No, bulls would gum it. They'd flash
their dusty standards at the wide-eyes
and probably find some yegg to pin,
probably even the right one. But they'd
trample the real tracks and scare the
real players back into their holes, and
if we're doing this I want the whole
story. No cops, not for a bit.
I just can't help but love it. And for sure it's grim, but it's also really emotionally honest and beautiful.
All right, so I guess I have to address the fact that two (2) of the two (2) films I've written about on this blog so far happen to star Joseph Gordon-Levitt. So here it is: sometimes, I get hooked. (For example, this past weekend I read Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, and I liked it so much that I bought and read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close the very next day.) I saw Inception a while back, and while I was already a fan of Gordon-Levitt from way back (3rd Rock, anyone?), I just loved that he took a character with limited screen time - given just how much is going on in that movie - and made him feel so three-dimensional and interesting. I suppose what I wanted was more Arthur, but that's not available, so I went out and got more Gordon-Levitt, which is better, really.
