Film Review

Film review - Brick

Fear and desire, sex and violence, paranoia and lost innocence, guilt, betrayal, revenge... The mean streets of film noir? Or the school daze of adolescence? With his low-budget debut Brick, director Rian Johnson deconstructs traditional film noir and rebuilds it in a modern landscape. Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s, however Brick set in 2006, follows the trail of Brendan (Gordon-Levitt) and his hunt of his missing girlfriend alongside the pupils of a Californian high school. This institution's corridors and sports fields are populated by shady ladies and big-hearted sceptics who are all school-kids with no apparent schoolwork to do. Instead of macs, they wear sweatshirts; instead of trilby hats, we get baseball caps - and instead of luminous black-and-white with dark shadows and low key lighting, it's filmed in the stonewashed colours of indie American cinema.

Early on into the film Brendan discovers the dead body of his ex-girlfriend, he embarks on a two-day investigation which takes him all over town and involves a number of shady and mysterious characters with names such as The Brain, Tugger and The Pin. Despite the neo noir contrasting all of the typical conventions of a 1940’s Noir film these characters all seemed to reflect the ‘stock characters’ of a Noir film representing the stereotypical antihero, villain, femme fatale etc. but allowing a modern day audience to engage and connect on a personal level to each character.  One issue I did have with Brick was that it's all very well to be mysterious and deep, but if there's little for the audience to latch on to then it can come across as rather pretentious and as the story line was very complex and often hard to follow I occasionally found my mind elsewhere and not focused fully on the film.