A Look Back on Brick

Rian Johnson has a 10-episode order for a mystery series (Poker Face) at Peacock. It was recently announced his long-time collaborator Joseph Gordon-Levitt would have a role in the project. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Rian Johnson have a long working relationship going back to Rian Johnson’s first feature Brick. Brick is worth a revisit. To understand the present, sometimes you need to go back and look at the past.

Brick is a neo-noir film. You get it from the first frames of the body in the aqueduct, but it’s more prominent in the patter, the cadence, of the dialogue that takes you back to the classic noirs of the 40s and 50s. One of the central characters even drives around in a vintage convertible (all white with red leather interior. The film is a hyper-reality, and it invites you to come along for the ride.

Noirs are all about establishing their location. A sense of place is key. The world of the crime. Brick centres on teens, and their world is high school, so that becomes the central location, the setting, everything circles. For Brendan (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), high school is his “Chinatown,” the place he both hates but can’t avoid to solve the case. Rian Johnson also shows a great understanding of tropes outside of noir in that he avoids classrooms as a location (nothing interesting ever happens there).

The film opens with a body and then goes back to two days earlier. With this reset, you know Emily (played by Emilie de Ravin) will die before the end of the film, but as Brendan chases his initial leads, you are left to wonder along with him, that if he had decoded the clues faster, would the outcome have been any different?

In the early-mid 2000s TV was rampant with the teaser catch-up. This was when the teaser would show a big exciting moment (often the climax of the episode) and then go back in time to show all the events that led up to that moment. When done well, it’s a very effective method of engaging your audience quickly. Breaking Bad is a well-known example of this method. So, it doesn’t surprise me that Rian Johnston, who does a form of it in Brick, eventually directed Breaking Bad.

Rian’s love for the mystery genre jumps off the screen. The story has layers of mystery that get unpacked and revealed in intervals, some telegraphed but in a way that feels intentional, like bringing you along to solve the case. There are also references and illusions to the genre and the world it draws on from at large. Be it the Assistant V.P. Trueman (played by Richard Roundtree) who stands in for the role of the “Police Captain” letting his detective (Brendan) go off the grid to get a collar, Laura (played by Nora Zehetner) as the classic femme fatale, or a reference to a “Pinkerton Deli” alluding to the real-world Pinkerton Detective Agency.

Brick is noir in the truest sense. While Rian hasn’t done another noir, his main projects have lived within the genre of mystery since then (with one grand exception). He followed it up with a con (The Brothers Bloom), a thriller (Looper), and whodunits (Knives Out and its upcoming sequel). He is a gentleman that can thread a mystery.

It’s not a mystery what the “not mystery-genre feature” Rian Johnson is associated with is, as it’s one of the most well know properties in the world: Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi. I am not surprised he was chosen to helm a Star Wars film. He was coming off the success of Looper, which proved he could handle both action and sci-fi deftly. He was far less of a gamble than Colin Trevorrow was for Jurassic World who went from Safety Not Guaranteed. I loved The Last Jedi, it’s probably my favourite of the new trilogy, but perhaps a bright spot in toxic fandom attacking the film is instead of Rian Johnson going on to make more Star Wars products, he went back to crafting mysteries. I personally can’t wait to see the Knives Out sequels or the Poker Face series.

Brick is currently only available for rental or purchase through apps like Apple.

© 2022. UniversalCinema Mag.