The Leader

[Click to enlarge]

A recent handful of movies have toyed around with generational displacement by transporting established genres and styles into the harsh hallways of high school. The best of the bunch, O, infused Shakespearean tragedy with high-school soap opera; Ten Things I Hate About You updated Shakespearean comedy (namely The Taming of the Shrew); science-fiction combined with 1980s coming-of-age angst in Donnie Darko; student government catfights became allegorical satire in Election, while Saved! took an equally cutting look at organized religion; soft-core women-ogling and spy movie parody clashed with each other in D.E.B.S.; and so on and so forth. While this boon likely has more to with appealing to a larger demographic than with thematic context, such movies at least have the potential to be more striking and powerful in their infusion of cinematic artificiality and coming-of-age bewilderment. The cliquey, alienating hallways and identity crises of one's high school years are universally relatable.

Brick continues the trend: it's film noir in a high school. That's the one-line sell, probably used often in pre-production meetings, and it may conjure images of pubescent actors performing imitations of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Luckily, Brick's undeniably imaginative creator, Rian Johnson, intends his film to be more than a postmodern mockery of classical Hollywood cinema; his characters never lapse into an imitation of the "You just put your lips together and blow..." speech as performed in a cafeteria. In many ways, the hard-boiled, pulp-fiction habitat of movies like The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, D.O.A. and its illustrious ilk meshes well with Brick's high-school surroundings, not only as a cleverly absurd parody of tough-guy machismo (one intense confrontation climaxes with a character acerbically telling his principal, "I'll see you at parent-teacher conferences!"), but also as an elaboration of the simmering violence and desperation to belong implicit in the high school experience.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt - who gave one of the best performances in the last decade in Mysterious Skin (and who has a role in Barbara Kopple's eagerly anticipated Havoc) - is all gruff desperation as Brendan, an alienated teenager who embarks on a vigilante conquest with his sole accomplice (their relationship is hardly a friendship), the Brain. He receives a frantic call (in a public phone booth, no less) from his ex-girlfriend, who has intimated herself into the elite drug-pushing circles of their sunny south California suburb; days later, she turns up dead. Motivated by a romantic-cynical desire for vengeance typical of these neo-noir films, Brendan encounters two femmes fatales (a rich bitch and a conniving drama queen), a bevy of shady toughs (whose hideout tellingly is a florally-decorated suburban two-story), a series of cryptic messages and a succession of foreboding henchmen.

It's a fascinating idea, albeit one seeped in precocious gimmickry, and it must be said that Brick impressively treats its infusion of genres seriously. At the same time, it never quite transcends that idea; a succession of tragic, unexpectedly dreary events comprises the film's climax, yet the power of the film's fallout is muted by the audience's consistent awareness that we're watching an exercise of sorts. Tim Blake Nelson's O is a similar yet superior film because, despite its "Othello in high school" conceit, it stands extremely well on its own as a self-contained modern tragedy. Brick is less successful since it is more interesting as genre experimentation than as an aesthetic or narrative creation.

Brick does what it can to emulate film noir classicism while retaining its modern flavor (and a decidedly bleaker modern nihilism). Johnson's dialogue is punctuated by staccato slang and bold, overtly clever proclamations - it's well-written not only because of its postmodern irony (if Dashiell Hammett wrote his first novel in a modern high school, it may have been like this), but also because it surpasses irony and aims for genuine emotion. It's rare for such a film-school conceit to treat its narrative so seriously instead of confining itself to genre manipulation - the climaxes of Saved! and Election, for example, are mostly sarcastic plays on cinematic artificiality, while Brick, for all of its self-aware cleverness, ends on a note of dramatic ambiguity. Unfortunately, the actors' monotone delivery is a misstep; it's an apparent attempt to replicate the rapid-fire verbal warfare of classic films noir, but Brick can't balance its generic form and its narrative sincerity as adeptly as, say, Double Indemnity.

Johnson reveals himself as a striking stylist, especially through his own editing: the film opens with a montage of a corpse in a drainage ditch that's fraught with melancholy and impending doom. He also uses extreme close-ups more daringly than many directors care to, as the minute details of a scrap of paper or a burning cigarette punctuate the characters' heated interactions. Although the film is shot in color, the bleak, muted cinematography still makes striking use of blacks and whites, especially in an early close-up of a dimly lit character silhouetted against a theatre stage's brightly lit proscenium. Meanwhile, Nathan Johnson's free-jazz-by-way-of-Max-Steiner score is a perfect representation of the film's infusion of classical form and modern experimentation (the soundtrack would be fascinating to listen to on its own).

I've been steadily complimenting Brick's accomplishments, yet the film still doesn't feel successful. Its most glaring error is the grim, redundant performances by most of the cast; while none of the actors make the mistake of imitating their film noir forebears, they also never really embrace their characters as much more than icons in updated genre manipulation - which is a shame, since Johnson obviously intends them and the film itself as more than that. This shortcoming becomes especially disappointing by the film's ending, which is decidedly serious yet depends on the audience's identification with the characters - an identification which never really amounts to more than passing sympathy (if that). Gordon-Levitt's performance isn't particularly bad (none of them are), and when he's allowed an emotional breakdown late in the film we're offered a glimpse into his character's existence as a complex human being; yet for most of the film his complexity is limited to a seesaw of archetypes and genre characterization.

Consider Brick, then, as an "idea film" that is neither as glibly self-referential as it could have been, nor as uniquely revelatory as its infusion of genres could have made it. I was reminded of Spike Jonze's Adaptation, which is comprised so entirely of postmodern chicanery (it's a movie about writing a movie about writing...) that it's nearly impossible to appreciate its narrative sleight-of-hand, since it treats itself so sarcastically. Jonze's earlier Being John Malkovich is, I think, infinitely superior since its self-referential absurdity actually heightens the dramatic effect of the film's melancholy tragedy. Brick is somewhere in between the two, neither a totally glib meta-exercise nor a totally effecting modern tragedy; as a result, it is fascinating to watch yet difficult to approach. If Johnson can hold a tighter rein over his films' dramatic impact in the future, he probably has a masterpiece waiting to come out.

3 of 5

Article Tools