April 13, 2006, 7:38 a.m.
High School, Brick by Brick
Bleak and oh-so familiar.

By Peter Suderman

From romantic turmoil to the cruelty of cliques, passage through the locker-lined halls of high school can be mysterious and dark. It seems somewhat redundant, then, that the film Brick should be billed as a "high school noir," or, literally, "high school black." What could be blacker and bleaker than high school?

Brick draws its inspiration from the gritty mystery movies that came to be known as film noir, which were labeled as such for their shadowy black and white images. And although Brick lacks the elegant, under-lit photography of the original noir films, it finds plenty of darkness in the life of a high-school kid. Setting film noir tropes against a high-school backdrop, writer-director Rian Johnson's debut is a devilishly clever updating of the hard-boiled detective film. An expertly staged mystery that reflects the confusion of modern adolescence, Brick casts a gloomy, lonely shadow over both the nature of the detective genre and the perils of suburban adolescence.

Brick begins by making clear its dedication to preserving the structure of a classic detective tale. Opening with a shot of a high-heeled blonde lying dead in a drainage ditch, it quickly flashes back to the events leading up to the murder. From there we follow tussle-haired loner and high school junior Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he delves deep into the seedy underworld of petty high-school criminals. Along the way, he trades witty barbs with duplicitous damsels, basement dwelling crime lords, and an assortment of shady characters. In Brick, the cliquey stratifications of teen popularity look remarkably similar to the sprawl of the criminal underworld.

All the familiar detective story tropes arrive, but never quite as one expects. The gruff, interfering cop becomes a nosy vice principal. The friendly snitch becomes a nerd with a Rubik's cube. The rich, beautiful woman with a hidden agenda becomes a girl wearing brand-name denim who throws parties at her parents' house. Trading trench coats and suits for rolled jeans and t-shirts, Brick delivers high school by way of Dashiell Hammett.

Johnson's grimly twisted dialog is updated for the tennis-shoe set, but still retains the prickly spirit of many classic detective stories. Delivered in aggressive, rat-a-tat spurts, every line is either a putdown or an ultimatum. "Throw one at me," Brendan shouts to a gang of stoners, "I got all five senses and I slept last night. That puts me six up on a lot of you." Characters don't talk to each other so much as at each other, with every line uttered serving as a defense of one's own interests.

The effortless transference of mystery tropes to their new setting serves as a reminder of both the stability and fluidity of the detective genre. A mystery, after all, can be set anywhere. Isaac Asimov, for example, always claimed that his robot novels were little more than Agatha Christie tales reimagined for a world of burnished steel and computers. The surface details can be rearranged, but the essence remains the same: a detective on the hunt for the truth, no matter what it costs.

Here, the detective isn't a typical flask-chugging noir hero; he's a kid with dirty jeans and a messy hairdo. Yet he and the rest of the young cast act and speak with the ferocity, wisdom, and certainty one might expect of an adult. The effect is somewhat disconcerting: it bears the same slightly disconnected sensation one gets while watching a high school play in which all the adult roles are played by kids. Are they kids or are they adults — or do they exist in some uncharted no man's land in between?

In this sense, Brick is about the increasingly vague lines that separate childhood and adulthood. The teenagers in the movie seem to exist in fully formed, grown up-free zones — the adult world in miniature. And from pecking-order status issues to failed relationships, they seem to deal with many of the same struggles and concerns as adults, albeit on a smaller scale. Yet at the same time, many adults seem unwilling to forego their childish passions. One need look no further than trendy magazine articles about all too adult children and all too immature adults to sense a looming uncertainty about how to deal with the traditional age roles. In some ways, Brendan's detective shtick is a response to this uncertainty; as a teenaged investigator, he's searching for his place in the murky, not-quite-mature world of late adolescence.

One of the byproducts of this role confusion is the awkwardness it produces between children and adults, something that is plainly visible in Brick. Only two adults appear in the film. One is a tough-talking vice principle who gives Brendan a shakedown; the other is the sweet, naïve mother of a local drug kingpin. The school authority works on his level, and is subsequently treated as an adversary, but when the mother appears, the boys defer to her as she pours them orange juice and makes them snacks. One minute they're haggling over heroin, the next they're saying "please" and "thank you ma'am." As in the lives of teenagers everywhere, the presence of an adult, especially a parent, can change everything. Identity, for these kids, is as much a function of who is around as of who they are.

Identity, then, becomes an issue central to the film. For in unraveling the story's details, Brendan also unravels his schoolmates' true characters. Brick's use of noir tropes is far more that a smart gimmick — it parallels the mystery and threatening circumstances of the genre with the angst, loneliness, and occasional violence of teenage life. After all, what could be more hard-boiled than four lonely years in senior high?

— Peter Suderman is assistant editorial director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He maintains a blog on film and culture at www.alarm-alarm.com.

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