Running time: 110 minutes
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas
Rating 4 out of 10
Rian Johnson's directorial debut picked up an award for originality of vision at last year's Sundance Film Festival, and now arrives on UK shores pitched as an edgy alternative to the mainstream. It's very much a first-time effort however, and pales in comparison to the other films that were lauded at the same festival: Junebug, The Squid and the Whale and Me and You and Everyone We Know. The film makes an attempt at being a modern-day film noir: set very much in the present but using techniques associated with some of the classic films of the 40s. This basically involves a complex plot and characters who talk in their own patois, a dialect that is rarely explained (although journalists at the press screening were offered a glossary it's unlikely that the same will be available to the fee-paying audience).
Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Brendan, an outsider in his High School and a young man who is frankly way beyond his years in terms of intellect and his way of looking at the world. Gordon-Levitt is an excellent actor, as he showed in Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, and he certainly gives Brendan a dispassionate and distanced aura.
When Brendan discovers the dead body of his ex-girlfriend, he embarks on a two-day investigation which takes him all over town and involves a number of shady and mysterious characters with names such as The Brain, Tugger and The Pin. There's a Twin Peaks feeling which pervades the whole affair, and I was also reminded of the overlooked Zero Effect from 1999, a semi-spoof which knows exactly where it is going.
That's the trouble with Brick: it's all very well to be mysterious and deep, but if there's little for the audience to latch on to then it can come across as a rather pretentious and occasionally immature effort which tries far too hard to be too clever for its own good. And while Rian Johnson may be a name to watch, he will have to broaden his horizons, for while Brick would have made a very impressive fifteen-minute film school short, at 110 minutes, it's a somewhat wearisome effort to last the distance.
Paul Hurley
