Chris Knipp
03-31-2006, 10:21 PM
Rian Johnson: Brick (2005)
Dry noir transfer is another interesting Gordon-Levitt vehicle
Joseph Gordon-Levitt isn’t a matinee idol teen hunk type, like Josh Hartnett, but he has sex appeal – at least Greg Araki must have thought so, to cast him as the gay hustler heartbreaker in last year’s movie about how two sexually abused boys grew up, Mysterious Skin. Before that Gordon-Levitt, who’s a highschooler out to solve a murder in this, his current indie outing, played a damaged, violent boy in a sanatorium in Jordan Melamed’s Manic. He’s clearly a young actor who takes risks and seeks interesting lead roles.
Winner of the Sundance prize for “originality of vision,” first-time writer-director Rian Johnson’s Brick is a Hammett-style noir plot transferred to present-day San Clemente, California high school students. Lovelorn loner Brendan (Gordon-Levitt) was dumped by his girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) two months earlier when she started hanging out with rich kids and got involved in a nether world of drug dealing and petty hoods whose leader (kingpin) is a guy known – in an example of the coded argot of the piece – as “Pin” – played by Lucas Haas, the brilliant child actor who’s now thirty and chooses this time to look more stale and weird than ever, but sounds like any young California white boy – with a difference.
The language, which makes you strain as much as the intricate plotting, blends old-fashioned terms Sam Spade would use with invented jargon (like “pin”) or “brick” (a hunk of drugs) – AKA the older “hop,” “jake,” or “junk” (also used) —and the invented “bulls” for cops. A little promotional “glossary” is charming for its naivety or the gaps it reveals in current kids’ knowledge, if they really wouldn't guess what “shamus,” “take a powder,” “gat” or “duck soup” mean. But Johnson's lines serve up original combinations, as in “He’s a pot-skulled reef worm with more hop in his head than blood” (for a heavy doper) or “I’m not heeling you to hook you” (walking away to attract you). When some young viewers say they wish there’d be subtitles, that’s not just an indication of poor diction or a weak sound track (though it is better for the music than the conversation) but of dialogue so self-consciously arcane as to be at times impenetrable. Of course as we know, one of the writers on The Big Sleep said he wasn't sure himself who the killer was. But in pushing a transfer of noir vision to contemporary teens and an invented vocabulary at the same time, Johnson is asking a lot of his viewers.
Gordon-Levitt is hurting in this movie both physically and mentally - or at least he should be; we don't always feel it. His girlfriend comes to grief – which is why he becomes the self-appointed “shamus” seeking out the foul play when she disappears – and he gets beat up more than once – knocked out, like Sam Spade. But emotionally his Brendan has less depth than his Neil in Mysterious Skin. He does deliver his complicated patter with fluency and expression, though, and incidentally manages to be both resilient and cuddly. He’s good, but the writing substitutes deadpan for hardboiled – one of several ways the film is weak on the emotional side.
What makes this a ride worth taking for adventurous Joe is that it’s another odd, original film. His Brendan is cool, if wispy, and endures, felicitously gets all the goods on people, and ends up seeming almost a heroic figure among the brash villains, vixens, and oddballs.
Brick doesn’t always work. When the odds are upped the plot seems surreal, invented. Until there’s some killing, it’s hard to know it’s not all a joke. Johnson’s dialogue is at its best when Brendan and his pal The Brain (Matt O’Leary), a nerd in Coke bottle glasses, are in the parking lot trading data and plans – less effective when the self-appointed private dick is dealing with crimesters and dames.
It’s funny that the Pin lives with his mom and has her serve Brendan apple juice – country style, in a country style glass – and himself iced tea in her kitchen, but it seems far fetched that he has a whole brace of tough boys – chief among them wild stoner Dode (Noah Stegan) and enforcer Tugger or Tug (Noah Fleiss) at his constant beck and call in the house, in front of mom.
Brendan has a great rapid-fire summing up when the siren temptress Laura (Nora Zehetner) – the teen equivalent of the wicked lady who tries to win the detective’s heart and cover her tracks – tries to woo him and he cuts her off with a “It was you, angel…..” classic finale that brings the plot to its knees.
However, though Johnson’s editing and pace are tidy and he has some very smooth transitions from scene to scene, his hometown surfside West Coast setting is a long way from noir atmosphere, and may seem a little bleached out. Rian Johnson has blended River’s Edge, Blue Velvet, and the Maltese Falcon in ways that would clearly win him an A+ in screenwriting class but he sticks too close to his script and never lets his scenes run a bit for atmosphere so they might breathe or even sing. I can’t recall any scenes more memorable than the aforementioned conferences between the Brain and Brendan, or the ones of Haas and Gordon-Levitt sitting in The Pin’s mom’s kitchen sipping drinks. There aren’t any stunning climaxes, and the deadpan lingo rules out emotional depths.
This Rian Johnson guy is ingenious. His imagination and restraint could lead him to some intriguing work in future and he shows a tendency to go on his own path. But somehow Brick seems more cult novelty than a movie that can shake you up or thrill you.
(Shown at various festivals in late 2005, Brick opened in NYC and LA March 31, 2006, limited release elsewhere April 7.)
_________________
©Chris Knipp 2006
Dry noir transfer is another interesting Gordon-Levitt vehicle
Joseph Gordon-Levitt isn’t a matinee idol teen hunk type, like Josh Hartnett, but he has sex appeal – at least Greg Araki must have thought so, to cast him as the gay hustler heartbreaker in last year’s movie about how two sexually abused boys grew up, Mysterious Skin. Before that Gordon-Levitt, who’s a highschooler out to solve a murder in this, his current indie outing, played a damaged, violent boy in a sanatorium in Jordan Melamed’s Manic. He’s clearly a young actor who takes risks and seeks interesting lead roles.
Winner of the Sundance prize for “originality of vision,” first-time writer-director Rian Johnson’s Brick is a Hammett-style noir plot transferred to present-day San Clemente, California high school students. Lovelorn loner Brendan (Gordon-Levitt) was dumped by his girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) two months earlier when she started hanging out with rich kids and got involved in a nether world of drug dealing and petty hoods whose leader (kingpin) is a guy known – in an example of the coded argot of the piece – as “Pin” – played by Lucas Haas, the brilliant child actor who’s now thirty and chooses this time to look more stale and weird than ever, but sounds like any young California white boy – with a difference.
The language, which makes you strain as much as the intricate plotting, blends old-fashioned terms Sam Spade would use with invented jargon (like “pin”) or “brick” (a hunk of drugs) – AKA the older “hop,” “jake,” or “junk” (also used) —and the invented “bulls” for cops. A little promotional “glossary” is charming for its naivety or the gaps it reveals in current kids’ knowledge, if they really wouldn't guess what “shamus,” “take a powder,” “gat” or “duck soup” mean. But Johnson's lines serve up original combinations, as in “He’s a pot-skulled reef worm with more hop in his head than blood” (for a heavy doper) or “I’m not heeling you to hook you” (walking away to attract you). When some young viewers say they wish there’d be subtitles, that’s not just an indication of poor diction or a weak sound track (though it is better for the music than the conversation) but of dialogue so self-consciously arcane as to be at times impenetrable. Of course as we know, one of the writers on The Big Sleep said he wasn't sure himself who the killer was. But in pushing a transfer of noir vision to contemporary teens and an invented vocabulary at the same time, Johnson is asking a lot of his viewers.
Gordon-Levitt is hurting in this movie both physically and mentally - or at least he should be; we don't always feel it. His girlfriend comes to grief – which is why he becomes the self-appointed “shamus” seeking out the foul play when she disappears – and he gets beat up more than once – knocked out, like Sam Spade. But emotionally his Brendan has less depth than his Neil in Mysterious Skin. He does deliver his complicated patter with fluency and expression, though, and incidentally manages to be both resilient and cuddly. He’s good, but the writing substitutes deadpan for hardboiled – one of several ways the film is weak on the emotional side.
What makes this a ride worth taking for adventurous Joe is that it’s another odd, original film. His Brendan is cool, if wispy, and endures, felicitously gets all the goods on people, and ends up seeming almost a heroic figure among the brash villains, vixens, and oddballs.
Brick doesn’t always work. When the odds are upped the plot seems surreal, invented. Until there’s some killing, it’s hard to know it’s not all a joke. Johnson’s dialogue is at its best when Brendan and his pal The Brain (Matt O’Leary), a nerd in Coke bottle glasses, are in the parking lot trading data and plans – less effective when the self-appointed private dick is dealing with crimesters and dames.
It’s funny that the Pin lives with his mom and has her serve Brendan apple juice – country style, in a country style glass – and himself iced tea in her kitchen, but it seems far fetched that he has a whole brace of tough boys – chief among them wild stoner Dode (Noah Stegan) and enforcer Tugger or Tug (Noah Fleiss) at his constant beck and call in the house, in front of mom.
Brendan has a great rapid-fire summing up when the siren temptress Laura (Nora Zehetner) – the teen equivalent of the wicked lady who tries to win the detective’s heart and cover her tracks – tries to woo him and he cuts her off with a “It was you, angel…..” classic finale that brings the plot to its knees.
However, though Johnson’s editing and pace are tidy and he has some very smooth transitions from scene to scene, his hometown surfside West Coast setting is a long way from noir atmosphere, and may seem a little bleached out. Rian Johnson has blended River’s Edge, Blue Velvet, and the Maltese Falcon in ways that would clearly win him an A+ in screenwriting class but he sticks too close to his script and never lets his scenes run a bit for atmosphere so they might breathe or even sing. I can’t recall any scenes more memorable than the aforementioned conferences between the Brain and Brendan, or the ones of Haas and Gordon-Levitt sitting in The Pin’s mom’s kitchen sipping drinks. There aren’t any stunning climaxes, and the deadpan lingo rules out emotional depths.
This Rian Johnson guy is ingenious. His imagination and restraint could lead him to some intriguing work in future and he shows a tendency to go on his own path. But somehow Brick seems more cult novelty than a movie that can shake you up or thrill you.
(Shown at various festivals in late 2005, Brick opened in NYC and LA March 31, 2006, limited release elsewhere April 7.)
_________________
©Chris Knipp 2006