You get a call from an old flame, she’s in trouble and she needs your help. You start nosing around but when she turns up dead you really start getting serious. You’ve got a source, a guy who knows who the big players are, you tell him to keep his ear to the ground. He steers you to the local drug lord, your old flame was playing with fire it seems. You’ve had run ins with the authorities in the past and when they try and put the squeeze on you, you throw them a bone…if they let you play things your way you’ll make sure they don’t regret it. So you stir things up in the hopes of flushing out the killer…
‘50s film noir? Nope, this is Brick a film made in 2005 that takes all the key noir elements and transplants them to a modern day California high school. Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is our loner hero looking to find whoever killed his high school sweetheart. The crime kingpin is played by Lukas Haas (yep the kid from Witness grew up to be a drug dealer!) while the authority figure is none other than Shaft himself Richard Roundtree, not playing a cop but the school’s Assistant Vice Principle. There’s even an alluring femme fatale, played by Nora Zehetner, who worms her way into our hero’s affections but you just know she’s got her own hidden agenda.
The young performers give remarkably assured performances but it’s the hard boiled dialogue they’re given that’s the real standout here. Rian Johnson both wrote and directed the film but it’s with the former that he really excels. The film is full of quotable lines – “Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they’ll say they scraped it from that who scored it from this who bought it off so and after four or five connections the list always ends with the Pin. But I bet you got every rat in town together and said ‘show your hands’ if any of them’ve actually seen the Pin, you’d get a crowd of full pockets” – but it’s the way Johnson makes it work in the contemporary setting that’s the real surprise. Lines like “The ape blows or I clam” could have come from the lips of Bogie in the ‘50s, yet it doesn’t seem out of place coming from a teenager.
If the script is a work of art the direction is at times intrusive. Many of the stylistic flourishes work but a few grate, with some choppy, staccato editing particularly irritating. A more seasoned director would just let the scenes play out and focus on the performances rather than try and dazzle the viewer with technical wizardry.
For the most part though this works amazingly well, avoiding the film school cleverness the project could so easily have fallen into and instead created something that feels modern and yet owes a debt to the past, not least when it comes to Nathan Johnson’s cool jazzy score that brings to mind hot smoky nightclubs yet never feels out of place.
This is a unique take on film noir that deserves its own sub genre – teen noir perhaps?
Horror and Western film buff, Marvel comic geek, music lover and occasional gamer. 