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April 18, 2006
Brick falls to level of juvenile drama
I am not a picky or hard-to-please person by any means, but for the life of me, I cannot decide why I was so angry and irritated by the end of Brick, director Rian Johnson’s first full-length feature film, and winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Not to mention, the film has excellent word-of-mouth and tons of glowing reviews by all the right critics, which makes me ever more leery to slam it or dismiss it. The fact is, I didn’t hate the film, but in the end was terribly disappointed. Maybe its that same feeling everyone got when they saw The Village or even The Exorcism of Emily Rose; it just wasn’t what I was expecting, which is also true of Brick, but I like to be surprised and revel at the chance to be a highly adaptive and interactive audience member. The film is almost completely a re-hashing of 1940s film-noir films set in a modern-day Southern California high school, recalling most obviously The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and maybe even Laura.
At the film’s beginning, I was instantly drawn in. It opens with our protagonist, Brenden Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mysterious Skin), observing the body of a young woman, quickly moving onto to what feels almost like a small town community a la the stygian hell of Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Also captivating is the rather poetic dialogue, even if Levitt sometimes mumbles his lines, and what we realize is that these high-schoolers are talking like 1940s film-noir figures. The disappointment is the fact that Brick is all about style and less about substance--if I wanted to watch a film noir film, I could. My question to the film is what can this film add to an extinct genre from a long-gone era besides simply a revamp? We see seasonal modern adaptations of Shakespeare that butcher original material in order to, filmmakers and others say, make great stories available to modern audiences. Along with this we see countless re-makes and sequels.
So what, I ask, does Brick offer that elevates it? I honestly cannot say. Instead, the film is a glorification of high school drama, lending more power than is plausible or necessary by exploring a mafia-like network of drugs and degradation. In fact, we don’t really see adults that aren’t somewhat caricaturized, like Richard Roundtree as the Vice Principal/Police Chief, or the mother of The Pin (Lukas Haas, Mars Attacks!) who serves milk and cookies to her twenty-six-year-old club-footed son’s high school friends while murder and mayhem go on beneath her feet in the basement. Understanding that the film tries to be tongue-in-cheek, I still was disappointed to see that it ends up folding in on itself and becoming a copy of the product it wishes to put itself in conversation with. But understand, I don’t mean to say I hate the film, but, rather, was slightly irritated. The acting was excellent, the dialogue was superb (even though I realize that if I heard people talking like that in high school I would have thought them irritating and pretentious) and the film’s lead femme fatale played by Nora Zehetner (May) looks strikingly like Mary Astor. In the end, I’m just tired of seeing bloated, ridiculously glorified portrayals of high-school studentsčthe film could just have easily been done in another setting.
At the film’s beginning, I was instantly drawn in. It opens with our protagonist, Brenden Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mysterious Skin), observing the body of a young woman, quickly moving onto to what feels almost like a small town community a la the stygian hell of Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Also captivating is the rather poetic dialogue, even if Levitt sometimes mumbles his lines, and what we realize is that these high-schoolers are talking like 1940s film-noir figures. The disappointment is the fact that Brick is all about style and less about substance--if I wanted to watch a film noir film, I could. My question to the film is what can this film add to an extinct genre from a long-gone era besides simply a revamp? We see seasonal modern adaptations of Shakespeare that butcher original material in order to, filmmakers and others say, make great stories available to modern audiences. Along with this we see countless re-makes and sequels.
So what, I ask, does Brick offer that elevates it? I honestly cannot say. Instead, the film is a glorification of high school drama, lending more power than is plausible or necessary by exploring a mafia-like network of drugs and degradation. In fact, we don’t really see adults that aren’t somewhat caricaturized, like Richard Roundtree as the Vice Principal/Police Chief, or the mother of The Pin (Lukas Haas, Mars Attacks!) who serves milk and cookies to her twenty-six-year-old club-footed son’s high school friends while murder and mayhem go on beneath her feet in the basement. Understanding that the film tries to be tongue-in-cheek, I still was disappointed to see that it ends up folding in on itself and becoming a copy of the product it wishes to put itself in conversation with. But understand, I don’t mean to say I hate the film, but, rather, was slightly irritated. The acting was excellent, the dialogue was superb (even though I realize that if I heard people talking like that in high school I would have thought them irritating and pretentious) and the film’s lead femme fatale played by Nora Zehetner (May) looks strikingly like Mary Astor. In the end, I’m just tired of seeing bloated, ridiculously glorified portrayals of high-school studentsčthe film could just have easily been done in another setting.
Posted by dwright at April 18, 2006 12:44 PM
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