Brick **** (2005, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Emilie de Ravin, Matt O’Leary) – Classic Movie Review 409

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the lead in debut writer-director Rian (Looper) Johnson’s clever 2005 cult classic favourite neo film noir-style high school detective tale. It  won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

He stars as Brendan Frye, a teenage loner who forces his way into the underworld of a high school crime ring to investigate the death of his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie De Ravin), whom he finds dead in the entrance of a sewage tunnel. He hides her body in the tunnel and decides to try to find who killed her by inquiring into the meaning and connection of four words, including ‘brick’ and ‘pin’, which Emily had mentioned to him.

Helped by his nerdy buddy Brain (Matt O’Leary), he meets a series of small-time drug dealers, including Kara (Meagan Good), Dode (Noah Segan), Brad Bramish (Brian White), femme fatale Laura (Nora Zehetner) and Tugger (Noah Fleiss), on his troubled path to reach the teenager powerful drug dealer The Pin (Lukas Haas).

Capturing the essence of Dashiell Hammett books and Sam Spade-style 40s movie thrillers like The Maltese Falcon, Johnson effectively transfers their mood, atmosphere and plotlines to the setting of a modern-day high school. But it’s not just a copycat work or one of mere homage.

It’s creatively and inventively made into its own special thing by Johnson, conjuring it all up on an amazingly low budget of $475,000. The witty script’s full of wry dark humour and works as a compelling hardboiled mystery thriller too, though you have to keep your wits about you to follow all the dialogue, plot and clues.

Gordon-Levitt gives a commanding, impeccable performance, as always. Haas gives an amusingly eccentric turn as the villain. Richard Roundtree is also excellent as the San Clemente High School’s assistant vice-principal.

Edited on a home computer, it was shot in Johnson’s home town, and filmed at the high school he went to. Johnson wrote it in 1997, first as a novella, then a screenplay, but it took six years to raise funding.

It was enterprisingly shot in just 20 days and the shooting had to be done on weekends at the San Clemente High School, where he enlisted the then current students to work on the film. The cinematographer is Steve Yedlin, a film school friend involved with the project since the script was written.

The title refers to a block of heroin, compressed roughly to the size and shape of a brick.

Johnson also made The Brothers Bloom in 2008, his only other film before Looper in 2012.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 409

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