Classic noir, which thrived in the 1940s and 1950s, was born from pulp crime novels and a generally-felt suspicion and dissatisfaction with how law and order was maintained. In American noir, we see a bleak, sensual and expressionist reflection of societal upheaval that was more interested in shades of grey than crisp black-and-white. Decades on, filmmakers who came of age during noir’s heyday began to update their favourite hardboiled stories – think the psychologically and visually ambitious worlds of Thief, Chinatown, The Long Goodbye – contributing to the nebulous “neo-noir” genre that has persisted for much longer than noir’s original lifetime.
Like many neo-noir filmmakers, Knives Out and The Last Jedi filmmaker Rian Johnson has harboured an obsession with hardboiled detectives for a long time. His low-budget debut Brick is a pure, loving expression of Johnson’s obsession with the novels of Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon). Brick is a noir world localised within a high school, where football jocks and theatre kids take the role of femme fatales and criminal thugs. Brick pulses with an erratic, youthful energy without breaking its dedication to a serious, morally dubious world, in the process revealing why young people want to play pretend at being grown-ups.
Teenager Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) acts as a self-elected private eye in his quiet Southern Californian high school after his girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) goes missing. As he navigates the adolescent underworld, one noticeably lacking any adult supervision or authority, it’s not just grief and amorality that rise to the surface – you can feel Brendan push up against the clearly limited agency that high schoolers are afforded, even when they brush up with society’s darkest elements.
A crucial element to any hardboiled detective is powerlessness – they are not cops, nor magistrates or politicians, and solving a mystery doesn’t guarantee peace and justice will prevail. A hard-boiled detective is most likely to be left with the charged, volatile baggage left over from resolving a case; with Brendan, the messy aftermath of Emily’s death is multiplied by the fact he is a teenager, and is therefore unable to process even the lightest emotional anguish.
Pay attention to Brendan’s physicality, flitting between a still, hunched silhouette and frenzied, scrambling movement – he often feels like a cartoon sketch who intermittently bursts into jagged animation. (Something mirrored in the equally young director’s visual style: you can’t miss Brick’s breathless cuts and eye-catching composition.) When Brendan picks a fight with jock Brad (Brian White) to get the attention of a local drug pusher, he doesn’t seem overly concerned with his lack of fighting prowess – the blows he takes only encourages him to fight dirtier and overextend himself.
There is a bristling, unfettered energy inside him that feels quintessentially youthful, but never joyful or optimistic. But when he rests in the bed of sympathetic dame Laura (Nora Zehetner), he makes the very un-Humphrey Bogart choice to burst into tears. There’s something deeply moving about realising that the body and mind of our private eye has not been built strong enough to withstand the burdens of delving into a crime that feels personal and cruel.
But if they’re not suited for it, why does everyone pretend to live in a noir world at all? Well, precisely because they’re not suited for the world around them. In noir, everyone acts in self-interest, motivated by the self-serving cruelty of forces greater than them. For the youth of tomorrow, embracing a noir-tinged fantasy may only deepen the individualistic gulfs separating them from their peers, but it gives the illusion of agency. Brick becomes not just an experiment in high school noir, but a lesson in both its appeal and shortcomings.
Rory Doherty
Film critic and screenwriter
