Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [8]
In this instance the idea was to transpose the hard-boiled world of film noir to a Southern California high school. The talented (and underappreciated) Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Brendan, a student who’s pretty much a loner until he discovers the dead body of his former girlfriend at the edge of a sewage tunnel. He then takes it upon himself to discover who is responsible for the murder, which means infiltrating various social strata in and around his school—and ultimately getting in to see the local “Mr. Big” drug dealer.
Brick is not without a sense of humor; there’s a wonderful irony in setting a dark story like this in sunny California. But the reason the movie works is that it isn’t a spoof or a parody: what’s at stake here is deadly serious. The characters speak in a stylized argot that writer-director Rian Johnson patterned after the dialogue of Dashiell Hammett; it takes a little getting used to, but it’s worth the effort. Another ingredient that recalls bona fide film noirs of the ’40s—but is conspicuously missing from contemporary movies about teens—is a series of fistfights. Again, this isn’t playacting: you can feel that those punches really hurt.
The tone is everything in a movie like this, and Brick never missteps. Its visual style, its performances, and most of all its screenplay coalesce remarkably well. If I have any criticism it’s that it goes on longer than it needs to, but that’s a small price to pay for such an exhilarating piece of entertainment.
Brick marks Rian Johnson’s feature-film debut. He wrote the script shortly after graduating from USC, and spent the next nine years visualizing it (along with fellow grad Steve Yedlin, who shot the film). Perhaps that’s why it’s as polished as it is: a lot of thought went into the project before the cameras ever rolled.
When my daughter and I saw Brick at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, we learned that distributors were reluctant to acquire it because they thought it was “too smart” for average teenage audiences. Given the typical run of teen movie fare, they may have been right…but that doesn’t take away from the film’s unique qualities or its singular achievement.
10. BROTHERS
(2004)
Directed by Susanne Bier
Screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen
Story by Anders Thomas Jensen and Susanne Bier
Actors:
CONNIE NIELSEN
ULRICH THOMSEN
NIKOLAJ LIE KAAS
BENT MEJDING
SOLBØRG HØJFELDT
PAW HENRIKSEN
In 2004 I traveled to the Sundance Film Festival with my teenage daughter in tow. We arrived the day after the event began and canvassed a handful of people in the press office for recommendations of what to see, based on early buzz. Hearing good things about a Danish film called Brothers that was screening that night, we latched on to a pair of tickets. We knew nothing about the film or its director (Susanne Bier, whose Open Hearts had played at the festival several years earlier), but we were game. As Brothers unspooled we sat transfixed, and although that screening took place in January 2004, I didn’t see a better film the rest of the year.
The story revolves around a middle-class Danish family, in which one brother has always lived up to his reputation as the black sheep. He has just been released from prison and his future is up in the air. The “good brother” is happily married and the father of two adorable daughters whom he must leave to fulfill his military service in Afghanistan. His sibling promises to look after the wife and kids while he’s gone.
It would be unthinkable to reveal what happens next, but suffice it to say that each brother must deal with choices that defy expectations, not to mention their prescribed roles within the family. The drama is almost unbearably tense at times, both in the war zone and on the home front—and all of it seems palpably real.
Bier was schooled in the Dogme doctrine of barebones filmmaking—in fact, Open Hearts was also known as Dogme number 28—and while Brothers doesn’t follow all of its rigid rules, it does strip away any vestige of Hollywood-style storytelling.