THE MOVIE: The Brick THE DIRECTOR: Rian Johnson THE STARS: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Emilie de Ravin, Nora Zehetner B The gimmick that got people talking about tyro writer-director Rian Johnson’s “Brick” and helped him nab a Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival is indeed quite innovative: Johnson lifted both the narrative and verbal styles of the man who invented the modern American detective story — Dashiell Hammett (“The Maltese Falcon,” “The Thin Man”) — and employed it in a caper set in a modern high school in Southern California. Hence we find implacable amateur sleuth Brendan Frye (an excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt) dexterously tossing about linguistic antiquities such as “take a powder” (slip away), “tip the bulls” (alert the police) and “gum it” (mess things up), as he does his best Sam Spade trying to solve the mystery of an ex-girlfriend’s (Emilie de Ravin) murder.
The rapid-fire delivery of what is in essence a foreign language (at least to this movie’s youthful target audience) can be tough to follow at first, but it does-n’t take long to adjust to the staccato rhythm and decipher meaning. Once there, it’s great fun to get caught up in a twisted story populated with artful criminals (Lukas Haas nails it as a Kaiser Sose-like drug lord who lives with his mom and goes by the sobriquet “The Pin”), gorgeous dames (Nora Zehetner is one come-hither of a femme fatale) and meddling authority figures (Richard Roundtree of “Shaft” fame applies the heat as the school’s vice-principal). Johnson serves up a few red herrings that promise to keep you off-balance right up to the final scene. In an age when established filmmakers seem so unwilling to risks, it’s refreshing to see a promising young talent go all in and come up aces. (RATED R. RUNNING TIME: 119 MINUTES)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 31, 2006. Read the original PDF.