Hey, have you ever seen… Brick?

Brendan:

Why are you telling me all this? What’s your play?

Laura:

You think nobody sees you. Eating lunch behind the portables. Loving some girl like she’s all there is, anywhere, to you. I’ve always seen you. Or maybe I liked Emily. Maybe I see what you’re trying to do for her, trying to help her, and I don’t know anybody who would do that for me.

This is going to be first of a series of articles (if Brodie lets me) whereupon I’m going to try and focus on some films that may have slipped through the cracks, hidden gems, such as it is.  I would like to promise you this will be an every Friday kinda funk (yeah, it’s Monday, but this was done Friday, I swearsies.  I was asked to wait on posting it), but I know myself too well.  I’ll leave it this:  I promise I’ll try to make it show up on a weekly basis.

So.

There is not a single film I could think to better kick this off with than Brick.  This first-effort film may start to get a little more light shed on it after writer/director Rian Johnson’s second film, The Brothers Bloom, hits theaters this year.  Brick is a film-noir set at an unnamed high school, and it has all the classic elements that define the genre; a flawed, neigh-upon masochistic angry hero, a femme fatale, love gone wrong, and plenty of turny twisties.

What it has that you may not find in your standard film noir is dialogue so damned electric it just about explodes out of the screen and slaps you across the mouth like momma used to do.  The way these guys talk is… well it’s hard to describe.  They speak in lingo and code and sometimes it feels like you’re just barely hanging on to what they’re saying…but you still always know what’s going down.  It’s like when you’re learning to speak a new language, and you can’t quite talk in it yet, but you get what’s going on around you.  That’s this.  And the beauty of it is, every time you watch it, you get a little more out of it, it becomes just a little more clear, the story digs a little deeper.

And the great writing doesn’t end at snappy dialogue.  The story runs an excellent course from beginning to end, starting with a mysterious phone call and ending…well, where it ends.  One of the things I love most about the film is that it doesn’t make excuses or bother explaining things that, frankly, don’t need explaining.  We don’t know why people talk the way they do – like a 40’s detective comic on acid – even though it’s a modern setting.  It’s set at a high school, but we never see classes, or students in any great number, or teachers.  These are things a lot of filmmakers would try to over-explain, but this movie is never simplified, doesn’t compromise, and challenges the watcher a bit.

There is history in these characters too, but it’s a detective story, not a character study, so it stays at the ‘just enough’ level; it deepens the story if you want it to, and it’s topical if that’s how you want to accept it.  The hero of the story is Brendan (played so well by Joseph Gordon-Levitt that I’m salivating to see 500 Days of Summer, which he’s starring in), a quiet, brooding sort of guy.  It’s wonderful to watch how Brendan simply lowers his head, drops a shoulder and pushes his way through everything that gets thrown at him to get to the bottom of everything.  He seems like such an unassuming guy in old jeans and a t-shirt, big glasses, and longish hair, but by the end of it you can just tell he’s quiet determination incarnate, and he does it magnificently.

Don’t knock the rest of the cast either.  They’re all half-familiar faces, archetypes that you may recognize, but nobody is as simple as they may appear on the surface, and everyone has some piece of the film’s puzzles.

What is the Brick?  Who is “Poor Frisco”?  What does Tug mean, or The Pin?  There are a lot of questions, and you can’t trust anyone or anything.

Brendan doesn’t.