THE NOIR SMOOTHIE
“Brick”, 2006. Written and directed by Rian Johnson (and with a cool website that features a glossary). Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Matt O’Leary, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, Noah Fleiss, Noah Segan, Emilie de Ravin, Meagan Good, and Richard Roundtree.
First of all, I have to admit that I’m a sucker for any screenplay whose characters use words like “yegg” and “shamus” in conversation. And let me also state for the record that I would have loved, adored, admired, worshipped, forced all my friends to see, and memorized every line of dialogue in Brick when I was in high school. Now older, I can still admire this film even though its lack of heart bugs me. That said, Brick is a brilliantly shot, sharply written, well acted, ultimately soulless, and thoroughly entertaining film. And if there’s not enough quotes to be had from that paragraph, you publicists aren’t doing their job.
Brick is film noir. Noir, in case you didn’t know it, is the perfect balm for hateful teens. Brick does these poor souls a great service in taking this wonderful movie tradition and fusing it perfectly into a high school environment. In fact, this is a world so controlled by teens that they can blast gunshots in broad daylight, get knifed in school corridors, beat the tar out of one another in mall and school parking lots, and hide bodies in broad daylight without the intervention of the bulls–which means cops–or teachers or parents. In fact, such is the triumph of teenage life that whole gangs of violent, color-coded teens, in for a ‘sit-down’ can be served country-style apple juice by ignorant moms. I can already hear the squares mounting the challenge that there are virtually no adults in this world, that the folks are impotent, that these kids drink and take drugs freely, and what a lousy influence this is. Well, the squares can go fuck themselves. Back in my day we had to waste our time with John Hughes’ yearly offering (like Breakfast Club)–today’s kids are much better served with Brick’s nod to Hammett, Chandler, and all its thievery from Miller’s Crossing. They are especially well treated by a film so rich in dialogue–man, I would have memorized half this film and been muttering “he knows every two-bit reef-worm in the burg and where they eat their lunch”, and bugging the hell out of all my friends and teachers.
The story is as convoluted as anything Raymond Chandler ever scribbled, full of twists and turns and even dead bodies and kids in comas. It opens, for Christ’s sake, with our hero, Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), staring at the body of his former girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) laying face down in a ditch, and plays in flashback for a little while. Fortunately, Brick isn’t interested in the silly games of Memento–it’s a labyrinth designed to build an atmosphere for our players to strut their stuff, not for the director to pull the rug from under you. Brendan, a thin, bespectacled loner is reminiscent of Tom Regan from the aforementioned Miller’s Crossing (a great, great movie, by the way). Like Tom, he gets by on his wits and has the living shit beat out of him every fifteen minutes or so. After the fast-forward of Emily’s death, Brendan receives a mysterious note asking him to stand at a streetcorner one afternoon. The payphone rings, he answers it. Emily is calling about the brick. It’s a problem, she fucked up, she’s got to go, hangs up. And disappears for awhile. Of course, we know she’s dead, or will die eventually, and we’ll soon learn what the brick is (though my first thought, that it’s a brick of drugs, proved correct). Throughout, not only does Brendad use these hardboiled terms–‘yegg’, ‘bull’, ‘shamus’–but he’s fed a diet of new terms that he, and the audience, have to eventually figure out, like ‘pin’ and ‘brick’ and ‘tug’. On top of that Brendan has to first find her and then, after she’s croaked, get to the bottom of her murder. In the process, he works for both a drug dealer named The Pin (Lukas Haas) and his rebellious muscle Tugger (Noah Fleiss) and plays them against one another. He also pushes around stoner Dode (Noah Segen) who will eventually throw a bong into the works and gum things up. And, again, if you’ve seen Miller’s Crossing you might notice that these three characters so resemble Caspar, the Dane and Brenie Bernbaum it’s scary. Of course, the Coen’s movie was itself a mishmash of Hammett’s Glass Key and Red Harvest. No matter. In my mind, these are the kind of influences that might just pry the kids away from “Grand Theft Auto” and eventually stick their noses into some musty Jim Thompson novels or Howard Hawks movies.
Jesus, I wish Brick had been released twenty years ago. There’s a lot for teenagers to learn here: how could I have known that the key to fighting is an ability to get pummeled and kick people’s shins? Oh, yes, and to throw your whole flimsy body into every punch. Even more alluring, the film makes high school seem like a hotbed of sex and intrigue. Brick is peopled with the likes of elfin Lukas Haas, wearing a black cape, carrying a raven’s head cane and eating oatmeal cookies with his mom; Noah Fleiss as the muscle-bound dope who eventually warms up to our hero; sexy Megan Good as a teenage drama-queen chanteuse; and, of course, you’ve got your mysterious woman, Nora Zehetner. And the nerdy Brendan gets to flit in and out of every scene? And hit on by on the gorgeous young women? Did I mention I would have seen this thing twenty times when I was fifteen?
Brick is not without its faults: making Brendan heartsick and possibly the father of the murdered girl’s child is a silly and emotionally hollow sidetrack. The film also takes place in what must be the only California (or U.S.) high school without a single Asian or Hispanic student.
But Brick is an impressive first film, just the kind of movie that brings some excitement to a jaded movie critic and surly youth looking to find something to ignite their dreary evenings. With a dynamite soundtrack (with cow bells and wind chimes), gorgeous cinematography, and a Byzantine plot, Brick’s going to become the focus of some lonely teen’s healthy obsession.
MR. WENDERS, AMERICA NEEDS YOUR CAMERA
“Don’t Come Knocking”, 2006. Directed by Wim Wenders, Screenplay by Sam Shepard (from hundreds of late-night stories betwixt Wenders and Shepard). Starring Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth, Gabriel Mann, Sarah Polley, Fairuza Balk, Eva Marie Saint, George Kennedy, James Gammon, and way down the credits list (“Garbageman”) a fellow with the fantastic name of Rockey Whipkey.
So in the last four years, Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard would get together here in Minnesota to write Don’t Come Knocking. They’d walk across the frozen St. Croix river, snowshoeing across snow-crusted plains, to a little cabin that needed firewood to heat itself. One night, after tossing some old wood in the chimney (as Wim put it), the place suddenly filled with ladybugs, probably hiding out in the bark. Wim loves ladybugs. So he collected them, gathered some up, gingerly placed them outside. Then Sam comes in and flips out. “Those aren’t ladybugs!” he barks. “They’re Japanese beetles and they bite!” Slapping the bugs off themselves, Wim and Sam chased around clouds of Japanese beetles with an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner, sucking the bastards right up.
“I always thought there was a place for that story in Don’t Come Knocking,” Wim said, with a laugh.
Well, I don’t know why it failed to make the cut, because God damn if every other story’s isn’t in there.
Don’t Come Knocking is a great big mess. It is a spew of conflicting stories with a wonderful atmosphere, shot through with amazing color and an eye for people, frustrating and unevenly acted. Perhaps if I were under the influence of some recreational drug the movie might come across as a masterpiece. Sober and alert it is disappointing but still one of my favorite movies of this young season.
As I mentioned, Wim said it took four long years to make Don’t Come Knocking. Wim and Sam would gather together sporadically, scratching out a story and a screenplay, but mostly trying to come up with someone who would throw together enough money to make the thing. Personally, I think this is in insane. Wenders is no Orson Welles, hiding away to drink and eat up the profits (literally) and then fleeing to distant lands with cans of film under his hefty arms. No, Wenders delivers the goods, and on time, but the goods don’t make much money. True, sometimes his work is awful. But when Wim Wenders hits, his movies are sublime. For the most part, he hits in Don’t Come Knocking. And if some of the idiots in Hollywood ever got it through their thick heads to release his movies around the country, all at once like they do with shit like Failure to Launch, I think everyone would make some more money, and maybe he’d make more movies. Which is good for everyone.
The facts, which are like summarizing a drunken evening with a friend: Sam Shepard plays Howard, a down on his luck actor, once a big star whose career has cometed into the ground. He’s constantly inebriated, screws around, and one day hops on his horse and barrels away from the set of his latest movie and through the desert. Then, in a lovely scene, he trades his movie duds and fine horse to an old fart out in the desert. The old codger insists on keeping his beat up sweaty old hat–“You can’t have my hat!” he insists, and Howard agrees, walking away in his red socks.
Howard makes a beeline to his mother’s house, the mom played by Eva Marie Saint with her usual cool. While he’s hiding there, living in the basement and poring over his mother’s scrapbooks containing gossipy articles of his misdeeds (I don’t get that either), she informs Howard that a woman called years ago to say that he’s got a son (mom and son have been estranged for decades). So Howard borrows his mother’s old Packard automobile and drives to Butte, Montana to see Doreen (Jessica Lange) who he thinks is the mother of this child. There he meets the bipolar Earl (Gabriel Mann), his son, a young fellow who croons with a weirdo band and who hates Howard almost instantly. Also, Sky (Sarah Polley) is hiding out in the shadows, carrying her recently departed mother’s ashes around in a blue vase. She believes herself to be Howard’s daughter.
The whole time, Tim Roth is an insurance detective hired by the movie company to track Howard down to finish filming. Along the way, Howard wanders around Butte, Montana, which is the real star of this film. Butte’s a lonely, lovely town, a place that looks as if it stepped out of an Edward Hopper painting. And Wenders does his level best to make it look like a Hopper, with a rich palette of colors and sunlight and shadow. Butte, Wenders pointed out, was ripe for filmmaking: the last movie to be filmed there was a biography of native son Evel Knievel. And, noir fans, it was also the town that Hammett’s Red Harvest was supposedly based in (Wenders said that).
Don’t Come Knocking doesn’t seem to care about its plot, which is probably good, because it has more holes in it than my old cardigans after five years of abuse. Sam Shepard isn’t very convincing as a former movie star–the guy is, first and foremost, aging badly, looking very much like the old bastards that haunt cheap bars, clicking their dentures between sips of gin. And Jessica Lange, normally a genius, is given a role that doesn’t seem to suit the story–the rambling, enjoyable nature of the film is often undermined by her shrill explosions of emotion that come as a disconcerting shock. There are a million inconsistencies if you think too closely about the plot–why doesn’t anyone recognize this aging star with his picture hanging prominently in the saloon, Lange couldn’t think to contact Howard any other way than through his mother, and etc., etc.
Despite this, Don’t Come Knocking is full of charm and easy on the eye. The music is wonderful, as is usual in a Wenders film (you could do no better than stock your collection with his soundtracks, whether or not you’ve seen the films). There are a number of beautiful, beautiful scenes, such as the young Earl, pissed at his father, throwing the contents of his apartment through his window, then sitting in the street, tapping his foot on a garbage can lid, playing out his blue on a guitar hooked to his Pignose amp. All the while his girlfriend, played with bravado by Fairuza Balk, dances on the couch beneath an oil well with an American flag flapping in the bright blue sky.
Wenders is not interested in making a heavy point here; he celebrates this country and its beauty subtly and without the usual blather we’ve come to expect in this post 9/11 world. In fact, watching Don’t Come Knocking, it’s as if George W. was never elected. Which is reason enough to enjoy the film.
But it’s also the kind of movie I’d want to have seen in my hometown, the kind of movie kids should see. Between Don’t Come Knocking and Brick, you’ve got a wonderful start to a kid’s lifelong love of movies. In fact, I remember being blown away by the videotape of Wenders’ Wings of Desire and the Coen’s Blood Simple. Those films saved me in the burg of Mt. Pleasant, helping me to realize that Tom Cruise doesn’t have to be in every movie. But now Wenders–who helped both Nicholas Ray and Antonioni get back on their feet–can barely get financing. And Brick’s going to play in the big cities and vanish. And that fear–fear of quality films from uneven, but brilliant, minds–is why Hollywood is such a wasteland.
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