Brick

Brick

2005, Rian Johnson

A black and blue detective story told without pulling a single punch or dropping a single cliché. Beautifully written and directed. Delicately acted. With a host of teenagers playing what could quickly become a melodrama, and with mouths full of slang like:

Brick - A term used to describe a pound or kilogram of any drug, in the case of this film, its heroin.
Bulls - Cops; e.g., "What first, tip the bulls? Also, as a verb, to turn over to the cops; e.g., "I bulled the rat."
Copped - Obtained; e.g., "She copped the junk."
Duck Soup - Easy pickings.
On the Nail - immediately; e.g., "He wants cash on the nail. That's a pot-skulled reef-worm with more hop in his head than blood. Why pay for dirt you can't believe?"
Pick - A ride in a car (as in "pick-up"); e.g., "Did she get a pick?"
Raise - To get in touch with; e.g., "You couldn't raise 'em?" This is also used cleverly when Brain asks Brendan, "You couldn't raise her?" referring to Emily whom he could neither contact nor raise, as in raise from the dead.
Shamus - A private detective.
Shine - To wield (as with a weapon); e.g., "He shines a blade."
Take A Powder - To slip away; e.g., "Why'd you take a powder the other night?"
Yegg - A criminal

It's a wonder the cast does not blow the screen up with hot air. How the characters all remain calm and collected is a mystery in itself.

It's probably due to two things: Johnson's direction and his casting choices. Our lead is the grossly underused Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and he is supported by chameleon Lukas Haas, Lost's Emilie de Ravin and the gorgeous (I swear she looks just like my friend Faith) Nora Zehetner. The whole lot are talented character actors and it shows. They find ways of posturing, leaning, slouching, blinking, smoking, holding hands, running. They're amazing.

Granted, they have a tight script and pretty well-worn characters to fulfill (Brendan was Bogey, Laura was Greta Garbo, the Pin – Sidney Greenstreet).

Our Bogey/Sam Spade is Brendan Frye, loner extraordinaire. He eats lunch behind the trash cans of the school, reading Faulkner. Ostensibly, his ex girlfriend Emily Kostich ate there too, three months ago, before they broke up.

She dumped him, you see, because he was so determined to be this loner, to hate on everyone. And he ratted out one of their small time drug dealing friends to the school VP.

Yep, the romance is laid in the tangled plot of a drug deal gone horribly wrong, and little Emily takes the rap. Our very first image, in fact, is of sweet Emily's limp, braceleted hand in a sewage stream. No punches pulled.

The rest of the movie follows Brendan as he sets out to “break some deserving teeth.” Of course he learns more than he ever wanted to know, and nearly loses a few of his own teeth in the process. And so a dozen supporting characters surface and glitter their exquisite word play, and down play their emotional motivations, mislead, swipe at and dodge each other, pushing Brendan to the brink of what a normal 17 year old is capable of handling.

He's not a normal 17 year old, he's a character, by all appearances 30 years older, so he can. Johnson has remade the Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammet story and dressed it down to a place we would never have expected or recognized it. It's Swiftian satire, but with absolutely no humor or irony.

Not a brilliant turn, perhaps, but it has a brilliant outcome. Brick is stunning from start to finish, from music to schematics. If you know nothing or everything about film, this is a beautiful thing to behold.

Unless maybe you have a glass jaw. In which case, scurry down to the local Blockbuster, or scurry to your remote and order/download The Brothers Bloom. Brilliant for all the same directorial reasons, but with a fun, upbeat heist through Eastern Europe feel.

Fun Fact You Can't Find on IMDB: The whole cast of Brick appears in the first party scene of Bloom. Apparently they quite liked each other off screen!