Tell me a story

Viewed on December 29, 2012 on Netflix Streaming

I started watching this movie a couple of years ago. It was late at night, and by late I mean the sun was coming up. Too late for my brain to follow the odd anachronistic dialogue, but I was intrigued and always knew I’d finish it someday. Well someday finally came around.

What first appealed to me about the film was that it’s a film noir set in a high school. The protagonist is a high schooler named Brendan (played by the  always great Joseph Gordon Levitt). His relationship with girlfriend Emily (played by Emilie de Ravin or, as you may better know her, Claire from Lost) has recently come to an end, and soon after she begins dating this stoner guy, she’s murdered. Wanting to find her killer, and afraid the cops—or “the bulls” as Brendan calls them—will mishandle the investigation—or “gum it”—Brendan decides to solve the mystery himself. He then proceeds to get himself ingratiated with the school drug dealers, who he suspects had a hand in her death.

It’s got all the elements you could want in a hardbroiled detective story. Brendan is a kind of antihero. The school’s Assistant V.P. (played by Richard Roundtree) is almost like Brendan’s boss, telling him that he’ll turn a blind eye to Brendan’s investigations, but wants his back scratched in return. Brendan’s friend “The Brain” (played by Matt O’Leary) is his source of information inside the school. There are double crosses, violence, a lot of darkness and shadows, of course a femme fatale: Laura (played by Nora Zehetner).

Yeah it’s a funny conceit, but writer/director Rian Johnson never winks at the audience. (If Rian’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he and J.G.L. recently teamed up again for the movie Looper.) The teens talk like they’re in a 40’s noir film. I actually had to the put the close captioning on because I couldn’t keep up with the lingo they were using.  So yeah, it’s a funny world these characters live in, but thankfully they don’t know it’s funny. That’s where it works.

Where it doesn’t work is the mystery itself. The movie starts with Brendan looking for answers. We never see him as just a regular person. And we only see Emily alive through flashbacks, so we never really get to care about her, which means we never really care about Brendan’s pursuit. In a whodunnit, you should care about who done it, or at least what solving it means to the protagonist. I didn’t care about any of that. So while I loved the idea of this movie, the movie itself was a little less than satisfying.

 My Rating:

Brick
Writer/Director: Rian Johnson (The Brothers Bloom, Looper)