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| This is less a title and more the description of the emotional depth of the characters. |
Dear Internet,
"Brick"
is a 2005 noir thriller mystery film set in the suburbs. More specifically, the film is set in a
suburban high school and the surrounding area.
We follow around Brian, a take no nonsense hard boiled guy that does not
play by the rules. He receives a message
from his ex lover, Emily. The girl asks
for his help over a pay phone before hanging up abruptly for mysterious
reasons. Brian tracks her down and finds
a coded message on her person. He
eventually figures out the code and goes to meet her at a hidden location. When he gets there, he finds her cold corpse in
a storm gutter. Afterwards, Brian sets
out to find out who killed her, for what reason, and why she called him for
help. He will have to dive deep into the
underbelly of the suburban jungle and come against some of its deadly vices.
With
that I can stop trying to keep a straight face.
For the most part, "Brick" does try to keep to this plotline,
even if it seems to go nowhere for the longest time. The heaviest part of that brief description
is in the noir part. The film draws
heavily upon a genre that rarely is brought up now-a-days. Specifically, the story plays out like a super
cliché detective story where there is a PI who is out to find the murderer of
his old flame. He is not doing it for a
client but because it is personal. There
is the smart sidekick, nicknamed Brain, who helps the protagonist on his self
appointed mission. There is a femme
fatale, a drug lord kingpin, and a muscle character. Everything feels so directly drawn out from
another noir work that the film struggles to make something new. It feels less like an homage and more like a
display of a bag of tricks, the kind that other films have done before and much
better.
The first
thing that struck me as annoying was the dialog. For at least the first half of the film, the
bulk of what people say is a convoluted mass of unbelievable dialog that makes
the characters even less believable than they already were. No
one, for the longest time, speaks in a manner that reflects the reality of who
they are. None of them sound like 18-21
year olds. Instead, they sound like
disgruntled old men and jaded women in their mid thirties. It is again pulled from the noir films and
books that "Brink" stems from.
While it is understandable for the characters in those works to rattle
off dialog like "Throw one at me if you want, hash-head. I got all five senses, and I slept last night. That puts me six up on the lot of you,"
it feels painfully out of place when an 18 year old says it. Maybe if the film was not taking itself so
serious it could be chocked up to being willfully hammy, but I doubt this is
the case because of how the film treats itself.
The
film is sadly not a parody. It should
be. Noir films are so heavy and
depressing that they are easy to parody, but "Brick" tries to do the
same thing that those films do. There
are moments when the film breaks from the uber-dramatic plot, like when the
protagonist talks face to face with the drug lord while the drug lord's mother
prepares a meal for Brian, wondering if she has apple juice in the fridge. The film pokes fun at itself from time to
time, but it does so sparingly. When it
does poke fun, the film shifts so quickly from one mood to the next that it
does not act as the comical relief that it is trying to accomplish. Take for example when Brian is picked up in
the drug lord's van. The guy sits there
with a living room lamp besides him, inside the car. Besides being a tacky piece of furniture, it
shows the mindset of the character, that he makes use of such props to make
himself into a character from out of a book.
While at first it seems like a comical placement of furniture inside a
van, the scene continues to be a serious one because of the topic being
discussed and the manner that the characters talk. A talk still filled with dialog that fits
characters twice their age.
Then
there is the problem with the film's ability to render an emotional connection
with the characters and the situations that are present within the narrative. By this I mean the film could not get me to
care about the cast. Let me describe one
character: he/she is a manipulative, depressing, pseudo-intellectual who has a
chip on their shoulder and does not let anyone close to them. If you have seen the film, you might have an
idea about which character I am talking about.
If you have not, I will tell you.
There at least five that fit that description and another three who can
fit if you chop off one part of the description. The problem is that the film makes nearly
everyone unlikable. Perhaps this is supposed
to be a reflection of how noir stories have an anti-hero who acts not for or
because of some greater good but for his own shallow intentions, but this
creates an inherent problem quickly. In
"Brick," I could not make myself care about the safety of Brian. He was so unlikable that if he died while
trying to uncover the truth about Emily's death, I would not care. Worse yet, Emily was given next to no
character presentation that by the time she was found face-down dead I had no
interest to find out the details of her death.
The rest of the film was hoping that I cared enough about her that I
wanted to know the answers that I ended up finding the story rather boring
because it was resting on a point that it failed to deliver. This mostly is because Emily is just as
unlikable as everyone else.
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| The best acting in the whole film. |
The
noir genre, and "Brick" as a part of it, seems to take the opposite
track that most stories do when creating a protagonist. Most stories will take a character, imbue them
with heroic qualities, and then throw in a few faults that make him either more
believable as an individual or help him to be even more heroic. Take Indiana Jones for example. He hates snakes and is afraid of them, but
that only makes his bravery against them all that more impressive. Odysseus's promiscuity while lost at sea
shows his hypocritical attitude that he takes with his wife. These faults and vices are meant to illustrate
a point. In noir, it seems to be the
case where a protagonist is made by imbuing a character with vices and then
adding just a few virtues to make them a technical hero. It is supposed to make the character and
those near him to be shades of grey rather than clearly defined black and
white. Instead, it makes everyone shades
of black with nothing of interest to say.
"Brick"
is a bad film that masquerades as a deconstruction of the noir genre. Sure placing a murder mystery in a suburban
setting with high school setting points out some of the absurdities of the
genre, but if the film plays these quirky spoofs as straight, it only makes
itself absurd first. If I want to watch
a noir deconstruction I would watch the "Fillmore!" TV series. At least that show knew how to entertain
while poking fun at noir.
"Brick" forgets to entertain while it tries to be a "Hardy
Boys" meet "The Maltese Falcon."
The characters are not individuals but character types with clichés piled
on top. The fact that the whole story
boils down to a drug deal and a murder being solved and acted by kids make the
film feel like it is trying to tell a story that it quite frankly cannot. The plot does not correlate to the setting or
the characters. Maybe the creator wanted
to portray an "adult" mystery and show how children have to rise to
the occasion, but it feels more like that if it was not a murder mystery it
would have become an after school movie about who stole the fundraiser
money. I would have preferred nearly any
other kind of mystery story to this because "Brick" treats murder and
everything else so lightly, and not in a satirical manner or with black
humor. It is just so underwhelming that
even when the big reveal occurs, I find myself not even caring about the plot twist.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
P.S. Next is "Singin' in the Rain" (1952).
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