Multitalented Norton brings the drama in latest film
MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
★ ★ ★ out of 5
Cast: Edward Norton,
Gugu Mbatha-raw, Alec Baldwin
Director: Edward Norton
Duration: 2 h 24 m
Congratulations to Edward Norton. As writer, he has skilfully adapted Jonathan Lethem’s award-winning 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn, about a smalltime detective with Tourette’s, on the trail of civic corruption in mid-century Brooklyn. As director, he brings to the screen a beautifully realized old New York, full of crumbling architecture and gorgeous cars.
And as an actor, he fully inhabits the character of gumshoe Lionel Essrog, making his physical and verbal tics more than just a dramatic flourish. His frequent, explosive utterance of “If!” creates a sad refrain as he stumbles through life, lonely and misunderstood. Even his coworkers at Frank Minna’s detective agency call him “Freak Show.”
In fact, Frank was the only guy who was ever really kind to him — he called the orphaned Lionel “Motherless Brooklyn.” But Frank, played by Bruce Willis, gets bumped off in the opening scene, making this the quickest that Willis has died in a movie since The Sixth Sense. (What ... too soon?) He leaves behind a gun, a very nice hat and an angry widow, played by Leslie Mann.
Lionel is cursed/blessed with a photographic memory, and a desire to tug at a mystery like a loose thread on a sweater until the truth is both ravelled and unravelled. So he starts investigating Frank’s death, which takes him ever deeper into the city’s Byzantine politics. The thread he’s following leads to Laura
Rose (Gugu Mbatha-raw), an activist struggling to stop the borough’s slum-razing ways.
It also puts him in the way of Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), a thinly veiled version of urban planner Robert Moses, right down to his predilection for tiny models of the city, and his falling-out with his genius brother, Paul, played by Willem Dafoe. Moses ( both Moses R. and R. Moses) is a bridge-and-tunnel guy. Not in the sense that he uses them to commute, but that he arranges for their construction, and too bad for any community in the way. Cherry Jones appears as Gabby Horowitz, his Jane Jacobs adversary by any other name.
The film features a few lovely dissolves and some very quotable snatches of dialogue. “I just twist and shout,” Lionel tells a trumpet player (Michael Kenneth Williams),
who claims to have a similarly overcharged brain. “At least you got a horn to push it through.”
But there’s something off in the pacing of Motherless Brooklyn — at a shade under two and a half hours, it sometimes feels like it’s dragging its feet, as Lionel recovers from one retaliatory beating at the hands of nameless thugs, only to walk into another in the next scene. Maybe Norton has to take responsibility for this too — he also has a producing credit on the film.
Still, there’s much to enjoy, whether you immerse yourself in the gritty city or try to keep ahead of Lionel as he feels his way through the story’s central mystery. He says it hurts his head not to know the answers, so audiences can rest assured that he’s not going to give up the ghost. Satisfaction may not unburden a troubled heart, as someone says in the film, but it goes a long way to pleasing a cinema crowd.