A GUMSHOE WITH REAL GUMPTION
Edward Norton is terrific in this tale of a private eye with Tourette syndrome
Motherless Brooklyn (15) Verdict: Stylish gumshoe drama ★★★✩✩ Ordinary Love (12A) Verdict: Gentle tearjerker ★★★★✩
HOW many fictional detectives can you think of with physical, psychological or even neurological impairments and disorders?
There are loads: from Raymond Burr’s wheelchair-bound Ironside to Sofia Helin’s impassive cop Saga Noren in the ‘Scandi-noir’ TV series The Bridge, who suffered from Asperger syndrome.
It is a transparent device, in a desperately overcrowded field, to give sleuths some form of singularity, just as Hercule Poirot had his waxed moustache and dear old Lieutenant Columbo, despite plying his trade in sunny southern California, his raincoat.
Sometimes, these foibles actually contribute to the protagonist’s crime-busting skills. That is very much the case in Motherless Brooklyn, an overlong but handsome adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s bestselling 1999 novel, in which Edward Norton, who also directs, plays a New York private eye with Tourette syndrome.
This is Lionel Essrog, whose head-jerks and bizarre, sudden exclamations — ‘Coney Island hot dogs!’ for example, or ‘ twitchy twitchy twinky’ — appear to undermine his detective work but, usefully, give the impression that he’s dim-witted. Far from it; he’s sharp as a tack. And, perhaps as a sideeffect of his disorder, he has an infallible memory.
Norton is terrific in the title role (Lionel’s nickname is Brooklyn, given to him in the orphanage where they met by his mentor Frank Minna, played by Bruce
Willis). I’m no expert, but I’d guess he has worked diligently on all those Tourette’s tics
Evidently, this film has been a passion project of Norton’s for 20 years (he’s the producer, too), and he has certainly assembled a topnotch cast. As well as himself and Willis, the picture stars Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw.
Motherless Brooklyn deviates from the novel in its period setting. Norton decided to whisk it 40 years back in time to the late Fifties, enabling lots of Raymond Chandler- esque mood and dialogue. Women are ‘ broads’, detectives are ‘gumshoes’. Trilbyhatted men step out of the shadows and cigarette smoke curls up to the ceiling as if in homage to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, while a scene in a Harlem
jazz club lacks only Billie Holiday. There are some achingly stylish shots of Manhattan, and the cars are all Fifties classics.
Helpfully, it’s never hard to find a convenient parking space. THE plot, by contrast, is anything but straightforward, even though it all springs from the oldest and simplest cliché in the book: when Frank is killed, Lionel wants to know why.
It was Frank’s detective agency, staffed by Lionel and other ‘deadend kids’ he rescued from the orphanage. But Frank was mixed up in something fishy.
Lionel’s quest for the truth sets him at odds with his new boss, Tony (Bobby Cannavale), and steers him towards one of the city’s most powerful figures, Moses Randolph, a ruthless politician and property developer played by Baldwin, whose energetic gentrification schemes are fiercely opposed by local activists.
Whether the nod to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) is deliberate or not, it’s impossible to overlook.
Among the activists is Laura Rose (Mbatha-Raw), who has some kind of mysterious connection both to Moses and to an embittered, tortured soul called Paul (Dafoe, as gaunt, unkempt and unhinged as he was as Vincent Van Gogh in last year’s At eternity’s Gate).
The film certainly keeps us guessing, although I confess that one of my guesses concerned the amount of time that might be left before I could reacquaint myself with the outside world. It’s almost two-and-a-half hours long.
It would be unfairly glib, though, to call Motherless Brooklyn an exercise in style over substance. There’s plenty of substance, too; and a raft of fine performances, headed by Norton, who has added memorably to the canon (pun only mildly intended, for those who recall the obese TV detective Frank Cannon) of fictional sleuths compromised by one problem or another.
■ JUST as Motherless Brooklyn strives to be different, so Ordinary Love focuses on familiarity.
Set in Northern Ireland, it’s a gentle tearjerker about a long- married couple, Tom and Joan, beautifully played by Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville, whose lives were turned upside down years earlier by the death of their only daughter, and who must now deal with another threat to their emotional equilibrium when Joan has breast cancer diagnosed. As the title implies, ordinariness is the name of the game here. Theirs is a life together which has been scarred by ordinary tragedy and enhanced by ordinary love. The paradox, as always in such films, is that an unremarkable, decades- old marriage can only really be brought to life on screen by remarkable acting. Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling pulled it off superbly in 45 Years (2015), and Manville and Neeson are pitch-perfect, too. The affection, the tenderness, the bickering, the rages . . . we don’t doubt for a moment that they’re a couple, a team. Significantly, the film is directed, with great sensitivity, by husband and wife Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa. In film terms not much happens, yet in the context of Joan and Tom’s relationship, as the diagnosis leads to chemotherapy and a mastectomy, events could hardly be more convulsive.
It’s not surprising to find that writer Owen McCafferty, a playwright whose first screen credit this is, has drawn from intense personal experience; his wife had breast cancer. ALMOST
all the screen time belongs to Neeson and Manville together, or separately, but there’s a lovely subsidiary relationship, between Joan and a terminally ill man she recognises in the hospital waiting-room.
His name is Peter ( David Wilmot) and he used to teach their daughter.
Tom recalls him as arrogant, but there’s no sign of that now as he prepares for death and tries to offer Joan some pearls of encouragement, as well as one terse, sad observation about oncology departments that will provoke a shudder of recognition in anyone who has been through any of this: ‘Whenever they say “might”, he says , it means “will”.’