Rian Johnson’s high-school noir is sharp, tense and worth the concentration it demands. Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes the elaborate talk convincing, though some of the supporting characters remain hard to care about.
Rian Johnson’s Brick is an absorbing detective film with a demanding way of speaking, and we recommend it if a mystery that requires concentration sounds like pleasure. Johnson writes and directs a contemporary high-school story in which teenagers conduct themselves like private eyes and gangsters. He takes their posturing seriously enough for it to acquire some weight. The danger is that we spend the evening admiring the idea, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives us a reason to care about the person doing the investigating.
The dialogue takes some getting used to. Johnson borrows the compressed, combative language of Dashiell Hammett’s detective fiction and gives it to adolescents, who have plenty of reasons to avoid saying plainly what they want. There is humour in the mismatch, but the actors rarely solicit a laugh, and the school setting makes the obsession with status feel credible. Some exchanges still go by too quickly to untangle; when the plotting is this busy, a missed phrase can leave us catching up through the next conversation.
Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan Frye with a quietness that helps the extravagant language sound usable. His loner does not seem to be enjoying the opportunity to act like a detective, which makes a difference in a film so open to showing off. We winced during his fight with the school jock. The violence is treated seriously, and Gordon-Levitt’s restraint elsewhere makes that physical confrontation more uncomfortable than the premise initially leads us to expect.
Steve Yedlin’s cinematography gives the sunny suburban setting an unwelcoming air without making it look like permanent midnight. Keeping this detective story in recognisable daylight is a sensible choice: the young characters already supply enough borrowed menace. Jodie Lynn Tillen’s production design keeps their surroundings ordinary, allowing the criminal behaviour to feel intrusive rather than comfortably at home. The school remains recognisable as a place where the people involved should have rather less urgent things to worry about.
Johnson also edits, and the cutting has a nervous energy that keeps the investigation moving even when the dialogue threatens to clog it. It can also compound the difficulty of following who knows what; a little more room between exchanges would have helped. Nathan Johnson’s score uses unsettled, abstract sounds that suit the unease of these everyday places. The music helps make the setting threatening, though it cannot make a tangled conversation any easier to follow.
The larger reservation concerns the people around Brendan. Nora Zehetner’s Laura Dannon and Lukas Haas’s The Pin are intriguing presences, but too often we are watching performers fulfil the requirements of a detective story. That limits how much the adolescent distress can reach us, despite Gordon-Levitt’s efforts to keep it close. Johnson’s fondness for elaborate plotting sometimes leaves too little space for anyone to seem capable of doing something ordinary.
As a high-school film, Brick understands how completely a small society can occupy the people inside it. As a crime film, it earns much of its tension by treating the young characters’ troubles without condescension. At 110 minutes, it asks for sustained attention, and the pleasure of working through it is substantial enough to justify the effort. Save it for an evening when nobody wants to talk over the dialogue.
