The detective story genre has expanded massively of late, particularly in the form of the novel. Since the huge success of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, every nation and sub-nation on Earth seems to have its own detective. They are also to be found in many different historical contexts, from Steven Saylor’s ancient Roman “finder”, Gordianus (and he’s only one of several Roman detectives), to the hero of The Janissary Tree, in which the sleuth is a eunuch of the fading Ottoman Empire.
It’s a wonder, then, that it has taken this long for the detective mystery to hit the American high school, as it does in Brick. Writer-director Rian Johnson places his story in the bleached suburbia of southern California, but does so with more than a nod to the laconic, wisecracking style of the 1940s, when the gumshoe tale first blossomed in the work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who will be remembered from his stunning performance in Mysterious Skin, is the investigator in Brick. He’s Brandon, an accidental sleuth who takes on a particular case for personal reasons: his ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin), has dumped him and gotten overly friendly with the druggy crowd at this particular high school. So far, so ordinary, but then Brandon gets a frantic call from Emily. He feels he has to find her — and work out what the hell is going on.
From there the plot keeps getting more and more complex — it seems to be a time for twisty plots, with Lucky Number Slevin and The Black Dahlia both on our screens as I write. In Brick, though, the plot is no more complicated than it need be, and certainly no more so than the 1940s classics it echoes. By comparison with Laura or Out of the Past, it’s linear to a fault, and, unlike The Big Sleep, it has no obvious holes in it either.
There’s the local teenaged drug lord (Lukas Haas), pretentiously attired in sombre black; there’s Brandon’s information-supplying sidekick, Brain (Matt O’Leary), his pretty-boy face hidden by thick specs. There’s the heavy (Noah Fleiss), and of course the femme fatale, though saying much more would be to give the game away. I won’t even identify the actress. Certainly, she’s dangerously seductive, but our detective (like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon) sees through her.
One scene shows how cleverly Johnson has placed the gumshoe tale in the high-school milieu. That’s when Brandon is called in by the vice-principal, played by Richard Roundtree, the wisecracking 1970s sleuth Shaft. The confrontation between them is directly reminiscent of the many clashes between the private eye and the cops in such movies: who’s got what information, what can be revealed and to whom, and how to preserve the integrity of the detective and his work without falling foul of the law.
This scene, played note-perfectly by Gordon-Levitt and Roundtree, skilfully encapsulates the nature of the detective/cop relationship — its mixture of mutual distrust, grudging admiration and interdependence.
Brick looks good, shot (by Steve Yedlin) in an understated, unfussy way that makes the most of its rather bland setting. It has a great soundtrack as well, one that changes direction as often as the plot — kudos to Nathan Johnson and his rightly named Cinematic Underground. And all this comes on top of a crackling script, with performances that deliver fully on its potential. What a good idea: to reframe the detective story, which brings with it its own special satisfactions, in the high-school location — so now we have a whole bunch of attractive young people to watch, too.