Watching the detective

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I have read all Raymond Chandler’s books, some of them several times, but if you asked me for a synopsis of any of them I think I’d be stumped. I can remember scenes (the stifling orchid house, the blanketed old man in the wheelchair) and dialogue (‘She’d make a jazzy weekend, but she’d be wearing for a steady diet’) but not the plot. This film has had rather the same effect: I watched the credits roll four hours ago, and already its plot is blurring at the edges.

It’s not surprising: Brick is a detective story, a film noir, an homage to films like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown and The Long Goodbye. A baffling plot and an incomprehensible lingo are therefore de rigueur, as is the clutch of archetypes: a washed-up corpse, a loner who plays detective, a mysterious beauty behind the wheel of a convertible, and a hired thug wearing a wifebeater’s vest. But where you’d expect to find a tired chief of police, meet the vice-principal. This film noir is set in a high school: instead of trenchcoats and fedoras we get jeans and a Rubik Cube.

Geeky-but-cool Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) finds his ex-girlfriend’s body on a concrete riverbed. She had telephoned him, afraid for her life, two days earlier. He had tried to save her but couldn’t. Brendan embarks on a quest — which borders on the pathological — to find out what happened. He dives into the drug-addled underbelly of his home town and is soon taking punches from every side. Each confrontation brings him another bruise, and an inch closer to the truth.

So if we’re in a sun-soaked Californian high school, how do we know it’s a film noir? Well, everyone (but for our detecting hero) smokes.