Raving For Rian: Brick (2005)

Welcome to Raving For Rian: a brief series of reviews I decided to write in preparation for the release of Rian Johnson’s new movie, Knives Out. Every day this week, leading up to the Thanksgiving premiere, I’ll be reviewing one of his movies. I covered his fourth flick, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, when it came out, and now I’m going all the way back to the beginning, to his directorial debut, Brick.

When he receives a cryptic phone call from his ex-girlfriend, lonely high schooler Brendan Frye offers to help. Before he can find out why she’s so frightened, however, she winds up dead, and Brendan vows to discover who’s responsible. His investigation brings him into contact with a drug lord, a thug, a femme fatale, and other characters pulled straight from a classic noir. Do any of them know who’s responsible for Emily’s death? Watch the movie and find out for yourself.

Very rarely are famous director’s first films worth discussing. At worst, they’re bad.  Most of the time, they’re forgettable, and lack the artist’s specific trademarks, either because the filmmakers didn’t know what they were doing, or had too small of a budget to achieve what they wanted. With Brick, however, Rian Johnson comes out the gate swinging, giving audiences a directorial debut that’s both stylistically unique, and genuinely worth watching. This is a well-acted, very well-shot, incredibly original movie. On paper, it sounds absurd; a 1940s noir, complete with hard-boiled dialogue, femme fatales and loner detectives, transposed onto a modern high school setting. But when you watch the movie, it really works. Part of this is due to the fact that the film never plays its noir elements as jokes. As stylized as the dialogue is, it’s consistently used by all the characters, so, after a while, it feels organic to this world. And as archetypal as all the characters are, the actors play their roles straight, which, again, makes them feel consistent with the heightened reality. And for a movie with such a small budget, the cinematography and editing ,particularly in the fight scenes, is very impressive and energetic. The point is, as a debut, Brick is very impressive. It’s unique, it’s entertaining, and it establishes several of Johnson’s stylistic quirks, including anime-inspired visuals, and a pension for deconstructing and remixing familiar genre tropes.

Now, as impressive as Brick is, it’s not perfect. It’s a very low budget movie, and there are times where that shows, particularly with the sound design, which can get a bit muddy. And when you combine that with the hyper-stylized dialogue, which includes such lines as “Next I hear, the Pin’s raging over a certain situation with the junk Em’s partial to,” it can become hard to understand what the character’s are talking about. Also, despite the fact that this movie takes place in high school, it never really feels like high school. We never see the characters go to class, or interact with adults, except for one scene where Brendan talks to Richard Roundtree, whom plays the Vice Principal. Yes, this isn’t a real high school, but if you’re going to set your movie in one, you should try to make it feel like one. Like, for instance, I find it extremely hard to believe that the authorities in any school would tolerate all the fist and knife fights that occur in this movie. Seriously, at my high school, if you so much as talked too loud, much less assaulted someone, you’d get sent to the principal’s office. Here, kids try to kill each other, and there’s no adult supervision to be found. All that being said, I do like Brick, and think you should give it a look. It’s unique, stylish, and a strong debut from a promising filmmaker. Don’t hesitate to give it a look.