The Red Circle

The Long Good Friday 004: Dialogue-Driven Neo-Noir Debuts

by Tom Nix

1) Reservoir Dogs, 1994 dir. Quentin Tarantino

Let’s get the easy one out of the way, first. It’d be impossible to bring up the neo-noir movement without mentioning Quentin Tarantino. Before he more or less changed cinema with Pulp Fiction, Tarantino unleashed a hyper-violent, reference-laden, character-centric noir film, featuring characters that would not shut up.

From the discourse about tipping at restaurants to the overly long backstory Tim Roth’s Mister Orange tells, to the extraordinary double crosses – all of which have to be explained in monologue – Reservoir Dogs is something approaching a masterpiece. But, let’s be serious. Everyone who is reading this site has seen this movie. Everyone probably owns one of the sixteen different editions that came out on DVD or BluRay. I say use this as an opportunity to dust off this classic for another go-round. It’ll remind you of how great of a director Tarantino was. And then later this year you can pop in Inglourious Basterds to remind you how essential he still is.

2) House of Games, 1987 dir. David Mamet

After making his name as a supremely gifted wordsmith from his stage and screenplays, David Mamet was finally allowed to call the shots on his own film. Those of you who have had any interest in filmmaking as an art or profession would be remiss to not check out his book ‘On Directing Film,’ in which Mamet lays out his entire directing career in a breezy 128 pages. But, inside that brief volume lies a mastery of visual storytelling.

In his directorial debut, Mamet uses light and shadow and the art of the edit to tell his story with a direct intensity. His trademark rapid-fire dialogue is present here, but as the master he is, the dialogue does not tell us the story. It tells us the characters. It tells us the situations. It tells us the motives. Most importantly, he uses his characters’ language to pull the con on us as they pull it on each other. House of Games, like the unbelieveable Pick-Up on South Street before it, is more content to use the dialogue and shots as weapons rather than the bullet-fetish that makes up so much of the modern crime genre.

While I prefer his later con-man caper The Spanish Prisoner over his first feature, not even that twisty, turvy thrill ride gives us the insight that House of Games does.  The House in the title doesn’t refer to the physical place where people are parted with their posessions. The House is the Con, and you’ve just been had.

3) Brick, 2005 dir. Rian Johnson

Brick is an odd beast. One the surface, it seems like a bunch of kids reading Daschiell Hammett quotes. What it really is, however, is the debut of a real talent. Rian Johnson took everything he loved about the Noir genre and crammed it into a schoolyard romance rivalry. Very shortly after you adapt to some of the most hard boiled dialogue delivered in a great while, the “gimmick” of the high school setting fades rather quickly. These are real kids with real problems. And despite the fact that it all is dealt with in such a grim manner, nothing seems shoehorned.

Maybe this is almost totally due to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s unflinchingly brutal performance as Brendan, the hero/anti-hero of the story. His ex-girlfriend has ended up dead, and he intends to get to the bottom of it, no matter if he has to go through the roughest heavy, the most powerful druglord, and the steamiest women that his tiny town has to offer. All his scars will add up to the truth.

For a first time feature with a very minimal budget, Brick turns out to be a captivating and powerful film that displays exactly how tough growing up can be as filtered through the eyes of those who live it.

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