Brick is an amazing movie.

I’m not one to lavish praise on much of anything, but this film deserves it. I haven’t been this impressed with a movie since seeing Secretary several years back. Both are moody and resonating films that struck a chord with me. They’re also alike in that both sort of flew in under my radar; I never heard much about them till they made the winding path to DVD.

Brick is an elaborate and hardboiled detective story told in the noir style — think Chinatown or The Maltese Falcon — but set in high school. Here’s a quick synopsis taken from the movie’s web site: “Brendan Frye is a loner, someone who knows all the angles but has chosen to stay on the outside. When the girl he loves turns up dead, he is determined to find the “who” and “why” and plunges into the dark and dangerous social strata of rich girl Laura, intimidating Tug, drug-addled Dode, seductive Kara, and the ominous Pin. But who can he really trust?”

What really makes Brick so inventive and special is that it takes the style of those earlier crime thrillers and transposes it onto these modern high school characters. The hero Brendan (excellently played by the once-annoying Joseph Gordon-Levitt of ’3rd Frock From the Sun’) is the Humphrey Bogart character, flawed and alienated. Femme fatales, corrupt officials, even the “jealous husband” — all of the standard noir archetypes are represented.

The characters speak with that sort of fast-paced, hardboiled dialogue that just sounds so cool and that I wish I could write, like this little exchange between Brendan and an assistant principal (played by Richard Roundtree, a fact of which I was ignorant until looking up this bit of dialogue):

Assistant V.P. Trueman: “You’ve helped this office out before.”
Brendan Frye: “No, I gave you Jerr to see him eaten, not to see you fed.”

Another great line is when, after beating some information out of a guy, Brendan looks at the guy’s friends (who were watching) and says, “Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you.”

Just writing this little review makes me want to go watch the movie again, right now . . . and I would, but I have some other stuff to attend to. Brick could be my favorite movie of the year. Instead of telling you how much I think you should see this movie, I’ll leave you with one last quote.

Laura Dannon: “Do you trust me now?”
Brendan Frye: “Less than when I didn’t trust you earlier.”

JAB