Joel Cairo: ‘You always have a very smooth explanation…
Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?’

(The Maltese Falcon, 1941)

Brick is the latest manifestation of American cinema’s unquenchable fascination with the hard-boiled gusto of the great 1940s noir thrillers, where Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s sleep-deprived private detectives fought, romanced and wise-cracked their way through the seedy underworld of the city of angels. But whereas notable modern resurrections such as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential lavishly recreated the look of the golden age of gangsters, Brick wrenches the tried-and-tested genre from its historical moorings and deposits it squarely in a present-day anonymous South Californian town, substituting ‘man’s man’ Humphrey Bogart for a wavy-haired, bespectacled teenage misfit.

The moment said misfit Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) discovers the body of his one-time girlfriend lying in the outflow of a secluded river-tunnel, he is fated to plunge headfirst into the criminal circles of the town, on a mission to avenge his ex’s death. Enlisting the word-on-the-street knowledge of high school geek The Brain (Matt O’Leary) – the shady ‘informer’ character – and striking deals with the school’s Vice Principal – the ‘police chief’, naturally – Brendan has to use his head and his fists to penetrate the rings of protection surrounding local drug-dealer The Pin (Lukas Haas), the suitably eccentric, cane-carrying mastermind at the heart of the mystery.

While the dialogue is by no means a straight imitation of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, it is equally bristling, witty and (like the originals) forgivably unrealistic. Some examples… When Laura, the obligatory femme-fatale, asks Brendan, ‘Do you trust me now?’ he replies, instantly, ‘Less than when I didn’t trust you before.’ Or, Brendan, warning a lowly addict’s drowsy henchmen: ‘Throw one at me if you want, hash heads. I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night. That puts me six cents up on the lot of you.’

The sulphurous spark of the dialogue is a welcome riposte to the ‘um-like-whatever’ verbal gloopiness of teenage drama, and doesn’t feel at all incongruous to the desolate, glorified parking-lot of a town in which the story unfolds. Also as a concept, Brick is an ambitious first feature for writer-director Rian Johnson – his confident script and mildly inventive camerawork combine to create that essential touchstone of the ‘whodunnit’: suspense.

While the scope of Brick’s vision is commendable, in the end the story fails to deliver that devastating twist and denouement which were the narrative pinnacles of the classics, when the audience left the cinema struck by the screenwriter’s audacity and plotting. The dramatic payoff in Brick is far from satisfying (or straightforward), and the traditional back-tracking explanation feels tacked-on and abrupt. Despite this final flatness, the preceding tale of Brendan’s descent into the murky drug-fuelled gangland and the dodgy characters he encounters is decidedly effervescent stuff.
(4/5)