Sandra Hall, reviewer
August 5, 2006

Girlfriend dead, hair never in place, an unlikely sleuth learns that life is lousy.

Emilile de Ravin and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 

Emilile de Ravin and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick

Run Time
105 minutes
United States
Rian Johnson
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emilie de Ravin, Nora Zehetner, Matt O'Leary, Richard Roundtree.

Brick has a hero called Brendan who looks as if he's slipped out of the pages of J.K.Rowling into the world of Mickey Spillane and is still quivering from the impact.

A Sundance festival favourite, this first feature from American writer-director Rian Johnson is a straight-faced film noir parody set in a California high school where drugs are rife and Brendan's ex-girlfriend, Emily - a sad-faced blonde with a Melanie Griffith voice - has gone missing. No, not missing. She's dead. I might as well say so because part of the story is told in flashback and begins with her corpse. It's discovered lying in a stormwater drain by Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

Movies, as we know, are worthwhile partly because they take you to places you're never going to reach any other way.

In Brick's case, the pleasures of acclimatisation keep you intrigued for quite a while for reasons that are far from straightforward. But they do have a lot to do with the question that anchored the recent Australian tourism promotion: "Where the bloody hell are you?" The ambience may look commonplace enough - highways, industrial buildings, empty car lots, scrubby stretches of open landscape - but the language spoken isn't. An argot based on pulp-fiction slang niftily tweaked for an audience of twentysomethings, it demands such close attention that the press kit supplies a glossary. The lines are delivered at high speed - Johnson is a student of screwball comedy - and occasionally fall into the rhythmic patterns of blank verse.

There's a lot going on here and much more to come as Johnson serves up a classic collection of film noir types, redrawn to teen-pic specifications.

Laura (Nora Zehetner), the story's femme fatale, is the class princess, whose boyfriend is a thick-headed football star. The mob boss (Lukas Haas) is a heroin dealer still living at home with his mum, who cheerily dispenses breakfast cereal and orange juice to his shadiest confederates, and Brendan's offsider is a geek called The Brain (Matt O'Leary), who is old-fashioned enough to prefer books to computers.

The irascible Brendan is also worth getting to know. He slouches around in a baggy windcheater, can't see without his glasses and has hair that is yet to find a shape in which it feels comfortable. For a while you fear for him. Then he brings down the football hero with a roundhouse to the jaw, and you realise it's time to find other things to worry about.

Johnson shot the film in and around his old high school in San Clemente, California, but doesn't spend a lot of time inside the school itself lest we get the idea that he really is making a teen pic rather than a detective movie. Absorbed in his search for the killer of Emily (Emilie de Ravin), Brendan has stopped going to classes and views school as enemy territory. When he needs to interview a suspect, he makes a lightning raid. Hence we get inside the library and the school playhouse, where the languidly exotic Kara (Meagan Good) holds sway. As with every woman in the film, she looks as if she's trying to entice Brendan into her bed, but he brushes her off with his customary contempt. Only one woman is worth trusting and she's dead.

About now, I started getting edgy. It's not that Johnson isn't adept at producing interesting sideshows. The scene in which Brendan is ordered to the vice-principal's office to explain himself is a gem. Played by Richard Roundtree and filmed from an angle suggesting the cameraman was on his knees, the VP is an imposing figure. Since there are no policemen in the film, he's the next best thing. He's also willing to indulge Brendan's undercover work if they unmask the drug dealers on his campus.

But here's where the problems come in. These same undercover activities aren't racking up any more tension than they were at the start of Johnson's hard-working plot. By now Brendan has been so roughed up that he should be crippled with brain damage. Instead he bears nothing more disfiguring than a slight case of gravel rash. His enemies have chased him with knives, tried to run him over and kept him captive in their basements, leaving us in no doubt about Johnson's ability to choreograph an action scene, but the narrative stakes stubbornly refuse to rise.

The sad truth is that none of it matters. With all evils fully revealed, he looks no more disgusted than in the opening scene. He knew that life was lousy and his opinion been confirmed. Time to pack up and go home.
