Brick Is a Good Movie

After an aborted attempt to get Marmo to stay up past her bed time (she had to work at 8:30 in the morning, if you can conceive of such a thing) I finally admitted to myself that I wasn't to get anyone else to come and saw Brick on my own.

I was ready to be disapointed in Brick because there has been a rash of bad movies with good trailers lately. Plus, I read some bullshit reviews by people who couldn't seem to get a handle on it.

Sophomore year I saw Sean Penn speak at my college. He was talking about Amores Perros, and he said if he had made that movie, he would stop making movies (which makes sense if you watch, say, The Pledge). If I made Brick, I could stop making movies, but there's no way I would. It was just too good.

The World
In a fascinating interview at the film's official site, the writer and director of the movie, Rian Johnson, says that he set out to make an American detective movie (to get to the interview, click on "missing love" up top, then "about the production.")

He understood, though, that even if he made a great detective movie, it would be just another great detective movie. Audiences have too many expectations about what that genre means to be able to experience the story he wanted to tell as something real.

Johnson needed a world with its own rules, that was very visceral to the characters, and that wouldn't allow the audience to apply their own expectations.

His solution is to set the film at a high school.


It is here that I have to make my first reference, and although it may seem unflattering, it really is a compliment. Have you seen Fillmore!? It's an animated Disney series, a cop show set at a middle school. Like Brick, Fillmore! lets the audience enjoy conventions of the genre in a new way. Also, it has great chase scenes. That's really as far as I'm going with this comparison. Moving on.

It is so much goddamn fun to find the conventions and devices of a detective movie in this new, real world. There was a lot to love about Brick - the beautiful, open spaces, the surreal dialogue (which I guess people are making a big deal out of, but fuck 'em), Richard Fucking Roundtree. But getting to experience the best parts of an old genre as if for the first time - that's what I enjoyed the most.

The Good Friend
Casablanca is in my top-three movies of all time, right next to Die Hard, and one of my favorite parts of Casablanca is Rick's good friend, Sam. Sam always has Rick's best interest at heart, even when Rick doesn't. He's always there to help or listen and his loyalty can never be called in question. Best of all, it's never explained why Sam has this great loyalty to Rick. I tend to be the big listener in my relationships with my friends, and I always identified with Sam.

Brick's protagonist, Brendan, also has a Good Friend, Brain. Brain solves Rubick's cubes in under a minute. He knows everyone's locker number. And he's always there to help Brendan cover an angle.

The Main Character Regularly Gets the Shit Beaten Out of Him
Know how I keep talking about how much I hate Slevin? A big problem I had was that Josh Hartnett did not get the shit beaten out of him nearly often enough.

He has a promising start, getting his nose broken twice in the first twenty minutes, but then it's like the character shield goes up and no one can touch him. It's right around when Harnett is first getting on your nerves, when you're starting to understand that Lucy Lui can't carry this thing on her own and isn't she like 37 anyway, when you realize that everybody's probably in this as a favor to the Weinsteins. Basically, it's right when you're really rooting for Harnett to get the shit beaten out of him, and Slevin lets you down.

Brendan gets the shit beaten out of him constantly. He takes it in the face and just when he's coming back with nothing he goes all early Matt Damon on 'em. The great thing is that Brendan does not look like an action star - he's played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who's best known as the kid in 3rd Rock From the Sun. Violence in movies should be brutal and fun, and heroes should be tough, vulnerable and frequently beaten up.

Feels Like High School
From the interview with Johnson:

RJ: You know, Hammett was once asked if Sam Spade was based on any particular detective. He answered no, it's based on what every real detective would like to imagine himself to be. That's sort of analogous to our movie's relationship to real high school; it's not the way high school is, but it's the way high school feels.

When you're in high school, things don't feel - they didn't, for me - flippant and silly. A lot of high school shows and movies seem to me to have a very adult perspective on high school, the perspective of someone who is out of that world and is now seeing it in a slightly condescending manner. Once you get beyond it, it's easy to forget how you once were completely encased in its logic. Whereas when you're actually in it, and your head is completely encased in this microcosm, it's your world and it's a world you have to survive. And things seem, if not life-or-death, very important and mythical. The people you know and the dynamics of your relationships seem hyper-real. We tried to summon that here. The level of intensity that's in Brick equates to the level of intensity that I think a lot of us felt in high school.

To that end: a grand total of one parent appears, as comic relief. There's one other adult in the whole movie - Richard Roundtree as The Man (Assistant Vice-Principal Trueman.) That's it. Everyone else is high-school age, just like all the important people in your life when you were in high school.


The supporting cast, which is excellent, is not made up of stereotypes. Don't get me wrong - if you go looking for the femme fatale, the gangster muscle, and the football star, you'll find them - but these characters all get their own chances to step out of their roles, and that makes them different people than the ones we may have come expecting to see.

Setting everything in a high school also lets Brick get away with some other fun stuff.

Language
People are making a big deal of the language used in Brick - the trailer and website, for one thing, but also the shitty Chicago Tribune review I don't feel obligated to link to again. There's neologisms ("Bull" means cop, "dose" means to take drugs, etc. blah blah blah), and then there's the dialogue style of the movie, which is surreal, elegant and a little difficult to place.

To me the only question is whether the language is justified or if it makes a typical audience member question the reality of the movie. Allow me to dust off an old argument I made famous when defending the frogs in Magnolia, namely, "anyone who disagrees with me just doesn't get it."

Here's why the language was justified for me: first, everyone is in high school, which is as ripe a breeding ground for neologisms as America is likely to see. Second, the language quickly becomes part of the mystery - one of a number of McGuffins. Neat.

Third, and this is where I start to get snooty about it, is that the sophisticated viewer has been watching unconventional dialogue on television for awhile now. You know, on HBO. The best example is Deadwood. This is a Western that sounds like Shakespeare except everyone keeps saying "cocksucker." Like Brick, when you can't figure out exactly what everyone is talking about, you can just let the words and the beautiful visuals wash over you. Call that point four.

Fifth, Speedrail is always making up words and it's funny.

People Act Rationally
Even, at times, cleverly. This is a function of good writing. Bad writing leads to idiot plots. Good writing (I am learning the hard way) is about making everything your characters do make sense. It isn't as easy as it sounds, especially in a plot as complex as Brick's where the audience never seems to have the whole story anyway. There are even a few moments of character genius, like the end of the chase scene. Fun fun.

Why I've Just Written 1,400 Words About Brick
Brick is one of those rare movies that made me wish I were still in the world of the movie after I left the theater.

I don't like telling people to see movies because movies are good for different things to different people at different times, and Brick will not work for everybody. However, something about this movie spoke to me.

Maybe it's that it was independently made, that it was written for a small budget for that purpose, that it was clever and different and smart about the context an audience would see it in. Those things remind me of the movie I want to make.