Brick Is An Excellent Neo-Noir In Touch With The Past And The Present

The most prominent shared trait across Rian Johnson's eclectic group of feature film directorial efforts is that he loves to take traditional film genres and subvert expectations audiences have of those genres. The Brothers Bloom take heist movies into a quirky direction, Looper was a more methodical time travel action movie and The Last Jedi brought an intimate angle to the Star Wars mythos. Johnson constantly upends conventional genre norms in his motion pictures but he does so with clearly evident love and knowledge of the genres or franchises he's tackling. This prominent feature of his work as an artist was alive and well in his first directorial effort, Brick.


Brick sees Johnson setting his sight upon the noir genre, a classic Hollywood genre that's been homaged plenty of times in modern Hollywood. But how many times have you seen a traditional noir, complete with 1940's syntax, done by High Schoolers? Both the unique dialogue style of Brick and how entrenched it is in its noir roots are established early on as we get introduced to Brandon Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a troublesome High Schooler who discovers that his ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emile de Ravin), has turned up dead. Brandon is now on the hunt for the killer which takes him through a number of local criminal organizations, the most notable of which is run by The Pin (Lukas Haas).

Even that brief summation of the plot makes Brick sound very much like a tale Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe could have starred in during the 1940s. We've got ourselves a morally dubious protagonist, a murder, an ex-lover, corrupt people both on the side of lawfulness (principals and other school officials) and lawlessness. Brick is certainly steeped in traits that would define classic film noirs but Rian Johnson hasn't just come to the table only with pre-established elements. In both his screenplay and directing for Brick, he's got plenty of ideas for how to take the framework of a classic film noir and turn it into something new and exciting, with the decision to set it among a group of teenagers and early twenty-somethings being a particularly brilliant way to differentiate Brick from prior noirs.

Classic film noir is predominately starred older individuals in their thirties and forties, ones who could communicate a sense of well-worn angst that fit their characters troubled past. Even neo-noirs from the 1970s and 1980s typically continued this trend of having older individuals headline mystery thriller stories. But for Brick, the entire cast (save for a welcome supporting turn from Richard Roundtree as an assistant Vice Principal) is intentionally comprised of far younger actors who you wouldn't expect to deliver dialogue clearly meant to be evocative of classic film noirs. The dissonance between modern youngsters and classic syntax is jarring at first but one adjusts to it quickly thanks to the performances of the cast.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the rest of the actors in Brick deserve plenty of praise for executing the dialogue in this script so well. Instead of trying to make the dissonance between the age of their characters and their classical style of speaking a constant joke, the cast lends an impressive naturalness to their dialogue deliveries that have the audience totally buy that these characters could talk like this. One becomes immersed in the performances and the story they inhabit rather than the aforementioned dissonance. It also helps that Johnson can write classical noir dialogue incredibly well, Rob Schneider could deliver these lines and they'd likely still register as compelling.

Brick further entertainingly differentiates itself from noirs of the past in the environments Brandon visits throughout his journey. Typical suburban neighborhoods or the vice principal's office are not the kinds of places Humphery Bogart or Fred MacMurray would have visited in their own classic film noir stories, which were predominately set in lavish city locales, but such unorthodox territories fit like a glove into the story of Brick. Interestingly though, the place where Emily's body is found, the exit of a gigantic storm drain, feels like the perfect sort of dingy location for a grisly crime scene in an older film noir. Once again, one can see the balance of the old and the new cropping up in Rian Johnson's work in Brick.

For those worried Brick will solely work for film noir aficionados, fear not, there's plenty of outstanding elements in Brick beyond just the way it fuses classic film noir elements with a more modern take on the genre, though. Johnson's twisty-turny story that manages to keep one constantly guessing works incredibly well on its own merits while the sublime editing and cinematography are both impressively realized and contribute mightily to how thrilling this movie is, particularly in sequences like a fantastic chase scene where Brandon is being pursued by an unknown adversary. Brick sure does work impressively well as a unique take on the realm of film noir and as the genesis for Rian Johnson's subversive career as a filmmaker, but it's also just an excellent movie on its own terms.