Brick
Friday, April 28, 2006
Brick
A high school kid, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, goes in search of his ex-girlfriend and finds she's started hanging out with the wrong crowd, kids who huff gas behind the local diner and deal small amounts of heavy drugs from their parent's basement rec-room. The kids all speak an amalgam of teenaged slang and gangster patois, i.e, "it's duck soup for you yegs," meaning, "it's going to be easy." Things spiral out of control, and early on, someone winds up dead. There are pictograms and odd clues. Fists fly. A gun is drawn.
You should see Brick, even if the trailer makes it look like it was made for French babies, because it promises a service which it then supplies generously. It combines the best elements of a John Hughes film with the best elements of a particular type of Film Noir, the plot-driven atmospheric spiral of The Big Sleep, Chinatown and Blue Velvet. It smartly recognizes those places where the push and pull of authority and helplessness, the rigorously formal ranking system, fits just as well with teenagers as with cops and criminals.
In Blue Velvet the teenaged protagonist is awakened to sexual experience past the point of mania. Brick represents the day after, that feeling of the first day in a long, bleak tally of days after the apocalypse. That is to say, it's a teen breakup movie. If both Blue Velvet and Brick finally lead to a little far-fetched gunplay and murder it's only because crime films are as close as we like to get to operatic emotion: instead of the soprano bellowing into the rafters with clenched fists we prefer the hero muttering over the body of a dead lover. This sort of operatic emotion is what teens do.
Once things start clicking with this movie, and you see that it's going to play it dead straight to the end, it's a real head slapping moment. It seems like someone should have thought of this before. When the Vice Principle stands up regally and tells our protagonist "I could bust you right now for talking back to a VP," it only occurs to you a few seconds later that it's a funny line. The lead bad guy is particularly mysterious not just because he deals drugs but because he is all of 26. The point is, we've been with the Gordon-Lewis too long not to take the stakes absolutely seriously. He holds on to the role chin forward, like gravity itself. The whole cast act like perfect teenagers, which is to say that they act as if they had invented adulthood, or were inventing it.
A second realization follows after seeing Brick, that is, there's nothing more adult than a screen detective. Humphrey Bogart hurling some skinny hood against the wall. That's because he's unreal, the invention of a teenaged self which demands more drama and more life than adult life can provide. We're all thrown back to adolescence when we watch crime movies. Any hero flickering up there, any loser, backstabber, cop, millionaire, boss, con artist or prostitute, would deflate if not for that idea of a future self, shaped by that thing in the audience which once felt like half-a-thing and knew what it was like to be a virgin and to want knowledge and control to the point of bursting. In this way Brick shines a light backwards into the films that came before it, and stands pretty confidently among them.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:29 AM,
