Bricks

If you're an auteur buff and you enjoy following the career of a great filmmaker, either a classic one where you start going through all of their films, collection by viewing, or one you can watch from the start of their career knowing great things are ahead of them, you have a terrific bet in Rian Johnson. Last night I saw his first feature, Brick, a brilliantly crafted very low budget independent feature that takes the film noir genre, founder Dashiell Hammett style, into the high school, like John Hughes on speedballs.

It would be criminal to divulge too much of the plot, so let's go with Brendan, bespectacled quiet outsider who knows when to explode with his fists, gets a phone call from his ex-girlfriend who's in serious, serious trouble. He starts investigating with only one ally, his Rubik's Cube solving nerdfriend, The Brain, who gets the skinny and feeds it to Brendan whenever needed to advance the plot. Along the way we meet femme fatales and their lapdogs, tough guys and losers, and a drug kingpin who lives with his mom.

Johnson has impeccable taste, and I recommend this interview with him on the Suicide Girls site to know just how well-prepared he is. This is a young filmmaker who knows Fellini and Scorsese, not just Lucas and Spielberg (whom he also enjoyed being raised on much like the rest of his filmmaking generation), and who spent $30k of his sub-$500,000 budget to license The Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" (White Light/White Heat, side 2 track 2) to run over his end credits.

I'm searching for my mainline
I couldn't hit it sideways

Everything is good about this movie, save for the occasional underlit shot, but first and foremost the camera is always in the right place and reveals the story beautifully as it goes along. The pictorial values are very, very strong, with some classic noir ultra close-ups of loaded objects; a cigarette butt, a written symbol with a time beneath it, a trunk that won't stay shut.

The acting is uniformally good. There's no flinching, no winks, nothing that says, "This is a parody." It's played straight as can be, with lead Joseph Gordon-Levitt erasing any memory of his stretch as a teen actor on the silly sitcom Third Rock from the Sun and great support from everyone else. I think all of the nine or ten young actors who carry the movie have terrific careers ahead of them, that this will be seen as a seminal pic just ten years down the line, but I have to say that three performances in particular hit me the hardest.

It seems hilarious to say it, but Lukas Haas proves that his performance in Witness (okay, he was nine years old at the time) was not a fluke. He is funny funny smart as the Mr. Big, and while he seems to work very regularly, he deserves a big boost in role quality coming out of this.

Emilie de Ravin, who appears to be an Australian transplant and has done a good amount of U.S. TV is rock-solid as Emily, the ex- in trouble. She's got one big scene and she nails the movie to the cross, the kind of scene that if she blows it, we just don't care going forwards. It would seem likely that she has leading lady capabilities for the future.

The guy everyone seems to love the most is Matt O'Leary as The Brain. (In one shot late in the movie he actually appears to metaphorically walk out of and back into Brendan's head). The Rubik's Cube is an ingenious film noir touch, as aren't all noir plots twisty cubes that risk never being solved, but O'Leary brings so much more to the role. By IMDB he seems to be the youngest performer in the picture, under twenty when it was shot, but he's like a seasoned pro character actor. Fave exchange (of many):

Brendan: I told you to stay away from her.
Brain: Did you tell her to stay away from me?

But the bedrock of the picture is the brilliant script, which not only infuses the dread, desolate high school and environs (seaside San Clemente, CA) with the crackle of classic remix noir dialogue, but has a story suspenseful enough to take us along. It's all there, the gumshoe who won't give up no matter how many knuckles eaten, the shifting allegiances and hidden motivations, the moments gone bad, tragic if only the danger would abate.

There's a meaning to the title revealed before too long in the picture (not too soon, either) and I don't want to spoil it. However, it's clear that Johnson has "br" on his mind as it seems a motif -- Brendan, The Brain both start with it, not to mention rich kid Brad Bramish. I haven't broken the code yet myself, first question I'd ask Rian if I met him, but it's clear that our lunchroom loner-cum-shamus, Brendan, is as much of a brick as anything. His girlfriend left him because he was impenetrable and he soldier on relentlessly like a big red brick himself. There's more going on than just stylistic ambition, and as the haunting Asian-esque theme signals us, Johnson is going for a very real sadness at the heart of the high school experience, or maybe the noir experience of puberty.

The last movie I saw that impressed me this much was Primer by and starring Shane Carruth. While Johnson has crafted more of a crowd pleaser, Carruth created a noir sci-fi atmosphere of dread in the setting of Dallas-area suburban outlands, all young engineers in white buttoned-down shirts and ties, speaking in their own high-tech incubator argot. Both pictures take themselves seriously but have scripts packed with wit, both create a convincing noir world on very little money, both have precision screenwriting and visual storytelling, both auger well for future works from their young auteurs. Think Christopher Nolan, who parleyed his no budget contemporary black & white London noir Following into Memento and eventually Batman Returns. Either of these guys could end up in that league, should they have such ambitions, or even more independent, like a Coen or Kubrick.

The signature scene in Brick features a cameo by Richard Roundtree (yes, the original Shaft) as Assistant V.P. Trueman, who's interrogating Brendan right after our gumshoe has gotten a beatdown. The two worlds of the movie collide in an upliftingly hilarious exchange climaxing that has the unyielding Brendan heading out the door with, ""I'll see you at the parent conference," like Humphrey Bogart spitting out lines at coppers Barton MacLane and Ward Bond.

It's a moment of affection for the genre from a film that is filled with love of noir, but this is the right kind of love, the smart and sensible one that eschews self-parody and instead uses irony the way it was meant to be used -- as a gat, as a shiv...as a brick.