Rian Johnson, the writer and director of Brick, was obviously impressed by film noir and his high school years. The movie declares itself from the opening sequence to be a grungy, just-out-of-the-alley murder mystery filled with greed and intrigue, honor and moral bankruptcy.
No one to my knowledge has ever attempted something like this, especially in a high school setting. Upon seeing the first few trailers, I was taken with the grainy, grayish cast of the movie. The lack of an explosion of color was deliberate, and back during the days of film noir, a black-and-white film was the rule.
Film noir has its roots in German expressionism, during the pre-World War II days. That was before Hitler turned the German film industry into a propaganda machine. During the 1920s and 1930s, German directors rivalled Hollywood, sometimes delivering many movies that American cinema tried to emulate because they were so cutting-edge.
France picked up the barely-lit stories set within the interiors of cities – alleyways, basements, and buildings – rather than well-lit ball rooms, and wrapped the style around morality plays. The stories always featured common men who warred with evil (greed and power) on a daily basis. Usually that war echoed within themselves as well as in the outside world, and it was often losing the inside war that resulted in the loss of the war in the outside world.
Humphrey Bogart became a legend playing more-or-less good characters that were potentially bad men, or playing bad men with a touch of good they couldn’t ignore. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, two of the premiere writers from Black Mask Magazine penned tales of private eyes (Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe) who were adopted by the film noir movies as favorite sons.
Brick, though contemporary audiences may not recognize it, comes from a long line of progenitors. Those who enjoyed this movie but have never seen The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Key Largo, The Big Sleep and High Sierra should raid local video rental stores to find them. Those were the films that set this particular bar.
Film noir always has the loner hero, a man who must walk down mean streets even though he himself is not mean. With those words, Raymond Chandler launched a thousand novelist and film careers.
In Brick, Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the loner hero, set apart from the rest of high school. Although the viewer doesn’t know exactly what it is that has set Brendan apart, the fact that he exists separately resonates throughout the tale. He’s possessed of dogged determination and he’s loyal. He’s also hurting from the rejection of his girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin). She told him she wasn’t like him, that she couldn’t just cast herself off from the rest of the crowd and exist independently.
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