This weird little movie infuses a mundane suburban teenaged world with a seedy syndicate of drugs, money, and dames. A teenaged loner named Brendan investigates the murder of his ex-girlfriend, who left him to pursue thrills and hard-core drugs in the school’s “upper crust” of the drug dealers, with who Brendan must now get chummy. The entire movie is presented in a terse film noir style. Indeed, it borrows heavily from ’30s detective movies, with informants, femme fetales, and terse, rapid-fire conversations thick with slang, accusations, and denials. When Brendan goes to the Vice Principal, he wrangles information from him like a detective dealing with his go-to lawman.
I spent the first 30 minutes of Brick trying to figure out what the filmmaker Rian Johnson was trying to accomplish by turning a high school into a violent gang-style underworld of crime. At fist I thought he was failing miserably at making a social statement. Then the film noir went over the top, and I realized it was pure spoof and relaxed. Hollywood has long grappled with the difficulty of cinematically rendering the American teenaged experience in new and interesting ways. Because the American teenaged experience is, in a word, boring, so we get cliched drivel about sports, cheerleaders, haunted houses, and puppy love. Unfortunately, while I appreciated the movie’s cleverness, I never enjoyed it, and the vocabulary and cadence of the slang was beyond me. An interesting movie that is more fun to think about on the way home.
