Before Benoit Blanc, there was Brendan Frye.
At first glance, the teenaged gumshoe at the heart of Brick doesn’t share much with the gentleman sleuth from Knives Out, Glass Onion and the upcoming Wake Up Dead Man. Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) styles himself as a lost Agatha Christie character, while Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a jaded teen who spits Dashiell Hammett dialogue before starting fights he can’t win.
But dig deeper and you’ll find two detectives caught in cases that contort around their own genre conventions. Both, of course, are creations of Rian Johnson – the writer/director who induces either delight or unspeakable rage, depending on what type of nerd you are. And both Blanc and Brendan play their cards close to their chest and keep the audience guessing, even when they don’t know what the question is.
Brick is certainly an ambitious first film: a hard-boiled film noir, but set in a high school. The story begins with Brendan staring at the body of a young woman in a stormwater drain, her outstretched arm weighed down with blue plastic bangles. Cut to two days earlier, and that same arm slips a note into Brendan’s locker, pleading for help and dragging him back into the school’s drug ring.
A lesser film would wink at this gimmick, but Brick plays it completely straight: there’s a twisty plot, moody imagery, a femme fatale, two-bit thugs and a dapper dealer who styles himself as the local kingpin and is “old, like 26”. Rather than wet inner-city streets, Brick basks in the concrete grime of suburban California: carparks, vacant lots and rundown schools. The now-cliched film noir voiceover is absent, replaced with Gordon-Levitt’s magnetic performance as Brendan, a loner whose apathetic exterior hides the fact that he cares too deeply to let anything go.
While it doesn’t have the comic accents and mocking social commentary of Knives Out, Brick is also a deceptively funny film, thanks to Brendan’s bone-dry affect (he calmly takes his glasses off every time he’s about to get his ass handed to him) and the tension between the poker-faced plot and reality. When one of the film’s baddies, The Pin (Lukas Haas), arrives on the scene like an Orson Welles villain in a black cape, he’s still working out of his mum’s plywood walled basement. When Brendan reels off a list of tasks for an ally, they include “cover for me for first [period] – I’m gonna be a little late”.
As with many debut outings, Johnson struggled to get funding and made the film on a shoestring budget, relying on the talent of his friends (like cinematographer Steve Yedlin) and family (like composer Nathan Johnson). The lack of money forced them to be inventive – the score features half-filled wineglasses with a finger dragged over the rim, and Yedlin’s clever framing and low frame rates allow stunts they otherwise couldn’t afford. Low budget doesn’t mean low risk: scenes are lit with mirrors, trippy montages strangle the camera, and the dialogue is almost Shakespearean, rattling along rhythmically until a line punches you in the gut. It’s an incredibly confident take on one of cinema’s most established (and parodied) genres.
Much of the Brick team have stayed with Johnson throughout his career – Steve Yedlin and Nathan Johnson are both integral to the Knives Out series. But it would be selling Brick short to say it is only interesting as a precursor to later success: it’s an alluring, all-encompassing mystery that draws you under and holds you down.
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Brick is available to rent in Australia, the UK and the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here