From Humphrey Bogart’s depiction of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon to masterpieces such as Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Touch of Evil, classic film noir continues to garner huge amounts of praise and appreciation from cinema goers and critics alike. However, it is perhaps the genre that has proved most difficult to recapture and maintain in the modern era, due in part to the fact that the particular style and tone synonymous with these great films owed much to the backdrop of the Second World War and The Great Depression under which they were produced. As Martin Scorsese puts it, "we don’t have the advantage of their disadvantage". Relatively few directors have attempted to add to the genre since the end of the classic period, and far fewer have done so successfully. The Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing act as rare examples of fruitful reincarnations of the original cinema form, while the recently released The Black Dahlia shows how easy it is for modern noir to unintentionally become a pastiche of its more illustrious ancestors.
In 2005 however, first time director Rian Johnson took Hollywood by storm, appearing from oblivion to create a film that perhaps comes closest to the calibre of noir last seen in the 1940/50s. Brick not only manages to capture the essence of the style and tone of noir, it also reinvigorates the genre. Johnson sets his story in an American high-school rather than in the murky back-alleys of the criminal underworld that audiences have become so accustomed to. This brave decision allows him to integrate a fresh set of visual cues into the traditional style and also helps to make the story more relevant to contemporary audiences, effectively placing a modern storyline within the a noir context. The film does however stay true to its routes, the opening piece of dialogue "I gummed it! I did what she said with the brick, I didn’t know it was bad, but The Pin’s on it now for poor Frisco and they’re playing it all on me." could have been taken straight from a Dashiell Hammett novel. This influence of hard boiled detective fiction is noticeable throughout, just as many of the classic noir films were adaptations of just this kind of literature; Double Indemnity for instance was adapted from a piece of pulp fiction written by James M. Cain as well as being heavily influenced by Raymond Chandler. This importance placed on diction is almost reminiscent of Shakespeare, the heightened attention paid to language means that even the simplest of lines are loaded with meaning and double entendres. For instance perhaps one of the greatest pieces of dialogue in film history takes place between Dietrichson and Neff when they first meet in Double Indemnity:
Dietrichson: ''I wonder if I know what you mean"
Neff "I wonder if you wonder"
This richness of language and wordplay is also a key element in Brick and the dialogue, updated to incorporate modern slang, is equally poetic:
Brendan: ''Look, I can't trust you. I didn't shake up the party to get your attention, and I'm not heeling you to hook you. Your connections could help me, but the bad baggage they bring could make it zero sum gain or even hurt me. Better coming at it clean"
The use of such vocabulary, which initially appears so out of place coming from traditionally inarticulate teenagers, could easily have destroyed the film's atmosphere, turning it into a sort of comedic farce. Somehow though it works perfectly, transporting the viewer into the type of environment seen in the best Billy Wilder movies (according to the press notes, Johnson even had the cast watch Wilder's films in order to capture the speech mannerisms). These quick fire lines of dialogue are a source of humour due to their sharp and witty wordplay, but at the same time they also manage to incapuslate the type of universe and values that are at the heart of film noir.
Brick not only deserves the title of modern noir, it is perhaps the film that comes closest to the quality of the classic films of Billy Wilder and John Huston. It succeeds in ticking the relevant boxes in terms of generic and stylistic conventions, but more importantly it also transforms the genre into something relevant to modern audiences, it manages to be an original piece of work while remaining faithful to its predecessors. Brendan is the perfect disenchanted protagonist, and the two females play out their separate roles perfectly, as their characters transform themselves into classic noir personas. The film took five years to make, and this certainly shows in the level of meaning and symbolism that the director has inserted into the script. All this serves to make repeated viewings equally enjoyable, a quality that only the greatest pieces of classic noir possess. Nothing in Brick is incidental, everything has its own purpose, and the story is stylistically brilliant as well as presenting a gripping and compelling plot, the film succeeds on both psychological and artistic levels. To truly deserve the title of a ''modern noir'', the film must adhere to the conventions of the genre but it also needs to bring something different to the format, something original to the 21st century. This is where Brick truly succeeds, it not only plays out its function as a film noir, it adds depth and originality to the genre, matching and perhaps even bettering those that have gone before it, which is high praise indeed.
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