Brick

Brick is one of those adolescent angst high school films where teenagers occupy a world wholly separate from the world of adults or, for that matter, from any world. Not having been an adolescent for some time, 36 years precisely, I can’t speak to the accuracy of the film. It wasn’t my adolescent world, back then. Why would it be? This is 2006. My son, who is sixteen, tells me it’s not his world either, emotionally or realistically. Of course, that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t describe someone’s world.

In the opening scene the main character Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an iconoclastic high school rebel (no leather jacket, however), sits staring at the body of his former girlfriend Emily, who lies dead in a concrete culvert. The film then jumps back two months into the past and begins to follow Brendan’s efforts to locate his ex-girlfriend, who has disappeared. Gradually we learn that she has taken up with drugs and people who sell drugs, and the film moves on towards its sordid conclusion.

The plot is convoluted and twisted, replete with surprises and revelations and betrayals and strange scrawled notes. It’s full of different characters, stylishly or loutishly dressed, as the case may be. It’s unrelentingly dim, horrific, depressing.

The New York Times review calls this a high school film noir, and that it is, with many if not most of the noir conventions. But film noir at its best has a coherent vision of a fallen world. This is a different sort of noir world. None of the kids in this film ever fell from innocence. They emerged that way from the womb. They’re fallen, mired in corruption, from the start. They suffer adult greed, adult passions. Brendan ends the film world weary and bitterly disheartened, as if he’s 45 years old. These characters, these teenagers, haven’t earned their corruption. Their clueless mothers clean house upstairs and offer glasses of Tang poured from a pitcher shaped like a chicken. Downstairs their children sell dope and beat and kill and rape one another.

One character, Laura (Laura Zehetner), has a faint resemblance to Mary Astor, and she turns out to be as wayward as the character Astor played in The Maltese Falcon. At the end of the film, Brendan figures everything out as Sam Spade did in The Maltese Falcon, and like Sam, he narrated the story to his Mary Astor. Gordon-Levitt does his best, but Brendan isn’t credible.

What’s at stake here? Mainly self-indulgence. Maybe if we move beyond the director’s attempt to make a teen-age film noir, maybe we could argue that Brick tells us in some vaguely general and symbolic way that adolescents feel more lost, believe that far more is at stake in their insulated, protected lives, than most of us who haven’t been adolescents for a while could ever understand. But this director I suspect doesn’t really care that much about teenagers. For him, they’re vehicles, agents of his cinematic mission. This really isn't a film about teenagers. It just uses them to tell its story.

Brick reminded me briefly of The River’s Edge and Donnie Darko, but in those films the adolescent characters were human. They had souls. In Brick the characters are pawns in the director’s game.