Film: Dir. Rian Johnson - Brick

Dir. Rian Johnson
Brick
[Neo-noir/School]






Rian Johnson is a film-maker with an astonishingly original vision. For eight years he laboured to assemble the small budget necessary to bring his stylised high-school detective story to the screen. The results show a confident first-time director assembling an unclassifiable, strangely intriguing film.

Brendon is a tough but honest kid who stays outside the shady drug dealings of the so-called "Upper Crust" at his california school. Taking place in a semi-fantasy vision of a school which pays homage to the classic noir films, (The Maltese Falcon, Marlowe etc.) Brendon is thrust into a world of mystery, double crosses and intrigue. The cast talk in a mesmerising dialect full of outdated or imaginary slang; it's immediately clear that this is not a film which wants to make any sort of hard-hitting point about teenage substance abuse or the like. It's purpose is simply to enertain, and perhaps make a point about how magnified in importance school life can be. The eponymous "Brick" is a solidified block of heroin - and it's at the centre of a network of double-crossings involving Brendon, femme-fatale Laura, hired muscle Tug and the sinister "pin" or kingpin of all the dealing at the school. Assisted by sage-like geek Brain, Brendon's out to find the truth about his ex-girlfriend's death. The film opens with a haunting score, reminiscent of spaghetti-westerns, as Brendon discovers her body lying dead in an evocatively shot drainage channel. Cut to a couple of days earlier, and we see Brendon receiving an impassioned call for help from Emily.

Unfortunately, it's largely downhill from there. The more the plot unravels the more confusing it becomes, due in part to the lingo, some of which proves indeciphrable; it is often not couched in enough context or spoken clearly enough to be intelligible, and ends up impeding the story. Were it not for this layer of smoke and mirrors, the cliched plot would doubtless be utterly predictable; even as confused as I was, one could smell the twists a mile off; the hero playing the villains off against each other, the inevitable backstab from a hard hearted dame, and so on. Further, whilst at best, the high-school parallels with classic noir fit nicely, some of the more obvious scenes (the interrogation by the vice principle, for example) seem rather contrived to fit with in the confines of the genre. "You've helped this office in the past" bawls the VP, and one can't help being reminded of every confrontation between a washed-up detective and the local police chief in the history of cinema. The characters, too, are halfway between caricatures and fully-realised portraits; confronted with an array of dull archetypes, the viewer is never entirely engaged. At least the music, stylish cinematography and production design manage to provoke emotion, to an extent, but this is very much a film for the head, not the heart. If Johnson's next film-school exercise in style and genre-bending can manage to speak to us emotionally, he will have made a great film. As it is, he's only written and directed a pretty decent, very unique one.

65