Listen, Shamus, Don’t Come Knocking Down My Homeroom Door

I recently had the chance to see a film that should interest crime-fiction enthusiasts on a couple of levels.

Brick, from 2005, stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, and a whole lot of other people you’ve probably never heard of. (Aside from Richard Roundtree, who you almost don’t recognize as a high school vice-principal.)

If Raymond Chandler and Stanley Kubrick had met in high school and decided to make a movie together, Brick is the film they would have crafted. Kubrick for scenes that are distantly beautiful and carefully choreographed, Chandler for dialogue you would have thought it was impossible to duplicate, even in spirit.

Of course, neither Chandler nor Kubrick put a word or an image in here. Writer-director Rian Johnson is guilty on both counts. Guilty enough that CHUD.com said that Johnson’s “debut film, Brick, is impossibly assured and great filmmaking, especially when you consider how easy it would have been to fuck up-–the movie is essentially a hard-boiled noir set in a Southern California high school, where the teens talk like they’ve got Mickey Spillane in their DNA.”

CHUD tells us that Johnson, a University of Southern California film school grad (class of 1996) had originally written Brick as a novella, but then turned it into a screenplay. You can download both the shooting script and the original novella for free from Johnson’s Web site.

The story is classic, classic noir--more Chandler or Hammett than Spillane, truth be told. There were moments I felt I’d read what I was watching. The Little Sister? I asked myself. Red Harvest? Elements of both or all, but it ends up being all Johnson, inspiration having been provided in the best possible way: as a boost to originality.

But the story: there are drugs involved and cash and gangsters. It’s set in a contemporary high school, but the kids don’t talk like kids. At all. They talk the film noir speak popularized in the 1930s and ’40s. And the dialect, the nuances, and inflections are all dead-on. It’s a little unnerving, at first. (As is the hauntingly beautiful visual storytelling.) But you pick up the rhythm after a while. You settle in to a familiar world, re-imagined; a world where you keep your back to the light, where dames are dangerous and you’ll do just about anything to prevent the bulls from knocking on your homeroom door.

If this sounds like a lark, I’ve not told it well. Brick is dark and gritty and the only laughs seen are issued with a sneer. The film is rated R for violence and drug-related stuff and is available now on DVD.