Thick as a brick

I erred in listening to the commentary track first. One of Brick director Rian Johnson's favorite films is Miller's Crossing. Of course, I thought, sadly: the young director whose own first film can muster a pulse only when it imitates the Coen brothers' enameled replica of film noir gaucheries. Most discussion has centered on Johnson's schooling of hapless young actors to intone the argot of Bogart, Mitchum, and Dick Powell. The DVD sound mix would be insulting if it didn't spare us the chore of listening to these actors mumble if not mangle the dialogue. I sensed the intervention of the Spirits of Noir.

Like so many young directors schooled in B pictures and not in the direct observation of life, the violent tableaux are, predictably, the film's most striking elements. Johnson directs the fascinating Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last seen in last year's excellent Mysterious Skin after leaving "3rd Rock From the Sun"'s orbit) so that the young man's taciturn intelligence is most creative when kinetic: when he's beaten up (often: Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day was the last actor to take this much punishment with such sangfroid) he punches and slaps foes who are often bulkier and taller than he; a harrowing chase allows him to devise the best leg-trip since Jerry outwitted Tom.

Brick reminded me of Cruel Intentions, another film in which a director ordered actors to mug archly: Glenn Close and John Malkovich in Guess jeans at the mall. If our educational system has permitted us to stud our sentences with "like" and "um" and "whatever," and actors are trained in nothing but pallid variations of the Method, why then sever the cast from their own remembrances of sins past? Give it up. Yes, well I remember how adolescence seemed naturalistic rather than realistic -- it was pulp, only duller -- but this is a retrospective judgment. Still, when I wrote my own high school novel just two years after graduation I was aware that the interpolation of myths and genres would only magnify the artificiality of my subject -- and the shallowness of my imagination. (The novel sucked anyway) . Brick's rather touching (and monstrous) mispairing of form and content is like an ambitious aesthete chronicling his university career as a monologue in blank verse (right, Wordsworth did it; you try reading The Prelude).