Film review: Brick

Mike and I went to see an afternoon session of Brick today; the 2005 debut feature of director Rian Johnson. It's a gritty contemporisation of classic film noir, with the sort of sharply observed dialogue that aspires to Raymond Chandler's definitive, polished prose, but which ended up more Mikey Spillaine pulp fiction. Instead of Chandler's mean streets, its characters face mean corridors: Brick is set in a suburban Californian high school populated by thugs, junkies and femme fatales.

Our lead character is Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mysterious Skin, pictured above), who recalls Chandler's description of a private detective in such a hard-boiled world.

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

Brendan isn't quite that heroic, but he certainly fits the mold of a noir hero: he's a brooding loner whose love for Emily (Emilie de Ravin), his missing ex-girlfriend propells him into an underworld of vice and violence, ruled over by The Pin (Lukas Haas).

This memorable take on a crime boss is one of the film's best flourishes, and while not all characters are so sharply drawn, even the most perfunctory help advance the convoluted plot , involving murder, and a missing brick of heroin.

The stylishly observed elements of noir that Johnson has wrought into his screenplay work cleverly to the film's advantage, as typied by a scene involving one of the only two adults allowed to intrude into this highschool-as-battlefield scenario, the vice principal. He's a harried figure who spars with Brendan the way a chief of police would with a rebellious but admired detective, in a scene shot from noir's familiar low angles to emphasise the tension inherent in their exchange.

While the film's style sometimes wins out over its substance, by and large Brick is a highly entertaining conceit directed with aplomb, and showcasing another charismatic performance by Gordon-Leavitt.

Three and a half stars out of five.