Film Review: Brick (dir. R. Johnson, 2005)

This is one of the better things I've seen in a long time. Maybe I wouldn't have had such a strongly positive reaction to it, if I weren't a fan of film noir. But even if you generally don't care for noir, this film is so original and so, well, clever, that you will like this.

You probably know the set-up already: It's a noir-like story but set in a California high school. It's a high school drug story, but set to a 1940s beat. That description might not do the film justice, though. Brendan gets a phone call from his ex-girlfriend, asking for his help. She comes up missing shortly thereafter. Brendan goes to his friend, "the Brain" (a great character), and asks him about words in the ex's phone call that he didn't know, including "the pin." The pin is "the Pin," short for kingpin, the drug kingpin of the high school world. Like Humphrey Bogart might have, Brendan works his way into the Pin's good graces to find out what "the brick" is, and what happened to his ex.

All the way through, the characters use NoirSpeak, asking each other things like "what's your play here?," and saying, "you'll take the fall for this." They even use noir words like "yeg." They get the cadence and the delivery right, too (which actually makes some of the dialogue hard to follow in places). Seriously funny.

In fact, my theory of why the film works so well (and it works, even though this description might make one skeptical), why it's so clever, is that the whole movie is one enormous sight gag. The characters are supposed to be high schoolers; of course, the actors are a little older than high school age, but they're still young. And they're dressed like one imagines California high schoolers dress. But. But they talk like Bogart, Peter Lorre, Lauren Bacall. They act out a crime drama in finished basements and on the football field behind the high school. The juxtaposition of these aspects of the film has a surprising effect. And when was the last time that you were surprised by a movie?