Hard-Boiled High: Teens study Hammett in 'Brick'

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 7, 2006 at midnight

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You have to be one smart cookie to make a movie that sets a Dashiell Hammett-style detective yarn within the confines of a California high school and not get laughed off the screen. Yet that's precisely what director Rian Johnson has done with Brick, a movie with a plot that turns dangerous pirouettes on a dance floor rich with film-noir references.

The most notable things about Brick are its characters' ages and the language they speak. Johnson, who also wrote the screenplay, has teenage characters speaking hard-boiled talk that's part invented and part culled from the film-noir reference stacks - an approach that places the movie squarely in the world of fantasy.

Landmark Theatres, which is showing Brick at the Esquire, will hand out glossaries with the movie, at least through the first weekend. Some samples: Copped means "stale," heel "to walk away from."

An example of the deadpan dialogue: "Lunch is a lot of things. Lunch is difficult."

In high school, that may be true. In interviews, Johnson has talked about the fact that his movie may not look like high school but remains true to the emotional experience. He may be right.

I suppose lots of high school kids see themselves as deeply alienated, which pretty much sums up Johnson's main character. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan, a slouching, emotionally wounded student who tries to find his missing girlfriend (Emilie de Ravin).

Brendan's search takes him into a high-school netherworld populated by a young, sexy woman (Nora Zehetner) and a drug dealer called The Pin (Lukas Haas). A brutal thug (Noah Fleiss) works for The Pin and spends a lot of the movie slamming his fists into Brendan's gut.

Some of the scenes are both edgy and silly. At one point, Brendan discusses a deal with the school's vice principal (Richard Roundtree) in what is surely the oddest exchange ever recorded between a student and a school official. Roundtree's character becomes the cop in Johnson's noir scenario.

The plot brims with neo-noir complications but, like adolescent skin problems, manages to clear up by the end. And it's at least interesting to let the winds of memory blow through the movie as you recall such classic noir efforts as The Maltese Falcon.

All this raises questions. Will young people want to see a movie that rises from the cynical vapors of a period they may not know? And will those who do remember the '40s think Brick compares unfavorably?

However those questions are answered, Brick deserves credit for avoiding any trace of teen pandering, even if the movie's combination of oddball language and intricate plotting can be both alluring and slightly impenetrable.

And the adult postures? Maybe they require more mileage than a youthful cast can be expected to muster. When we watched Bogart walk his way through a film-noir landscape, we identified. We wanted to be him, complete with cigarette smoke, cutting repartee and a sense that he understood the world better than we ever could. With all due respect to the talented Gordon-Levitt, I felt no such identification.

The one thing that was never in doubt for me was that Johnson has a big-time love affair going with film noir. That's why Brick represented a difficult call for me. As much as I wanted to make it past the movie's barriers, I had trouble with the idiosyncratic talk and noir textures. At various times, I felt as if I were fighting my way into the movie.

Still, there's humor and enduring strangeness to all this, and if Brick isn't totally successful, it does make Johnson a director to watch.

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