Brick

I watched two movies yesterday, the first being the illusive Brick. The brick of the title is compacted white powder—cocaine? The target audience for this movie does not include the writer of this commentary; all the characters are either just about to get out of high school or just did so with the exception of a couple high school authority figures—no matter, adults are incidental to this plot anyway. Not being an expert on the film noir I can’t comment on how this movie riffs on the genre; what I can say is that storyline is definitely not linear and plot elements are suggested, not made clear. We are give cryptic glimpses that puts one in mind of attempting to put together a picture puzzle without knowing what scene one is trying to assemble; being given disconnected pieces one at a time. The sparse dialogue which gets spattered at us in often throw-away lines is so au courant that it was probably passé even before the movie was released on screen in California.

There are no good guys here; our guide through this maze has a past as a drug peddler and slouches through most of the scenes as if he hadn’t quite come down from the previous evening’s high. Even though Brendan seems thoroughly familiar with the drug scene in his community; he meddles in it and shakes it up as if he personally were invulnerable. He allows himself to be used as a punching bag on numerous occasions but when the ‘muscle’ is finished he just picks himself up and walks away—the lad seems to be able to take a punch; and when he wants to, he takes out one notable bully with a single punch.

The movie ends with cross-piles of bodies of Shakespearian proportions but I’m left wondering what the point was. The dead girl we are shown as the movie begins was once Brendan’s girlfriend and may or may not have died three months pregnant with his child; but he displays no outward expression of that attachment beyond the investigation into the circumstances of her death that drives this movie. There is no one in this movie I can identify with or would want to meet and I was not sufficiently engaged that I would want to spend the time watching it again in an attempt to unravel the plot elements.