‘MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN’ IS CHARMLESS
Someday, not now, but soon, you should make a point of seeing “Motherless Brooklyn.” No, not the whole thing — no one deserves that kind of punishment. But do try to see 10 or 15 minutes of it, because it’s amazing, and not in a good way.
It’s far from the worst movie ever produced, but it’s a one-of-a-kind disaster, and therefore interesting. At the same time, it illustrates a couple of general principles: 1) Sometimes the lunatics really shouldn’t be running the asylum (that is, actors aren’t always the best at choosing their own projects); and 2) There are levels of awfulness that can only be achieved through sincere effort.
Based on the novel by Jonathan Essrog, “Motherless Brooklyn” has been a dream project of Edward Norton’s for the better part of two decades. He wrote the film, directed it and stars in it. And so in the first scene, we find him sitting in a car. It’s 1950s New York, and he and another guy are waiting for somebody. Then it happens: Norton bugs his eyes, opens his mouth wide and strains and twists his neck. He is Lionel, a low-level detective with Tourette’s syndrome.
In this early scene, Lionel and an associate are there to lend protection, if needed, to their boss, who’s played by Bruce Willis. The boss is heading into a meeting, and their job is to listen in, just in case things go bad. As they listen — and as they race to intercede, and as they engage in a fairly well-executed chase scene — Lionel keeps blurting out crazy nonsense, uncontrollably. It’s as though there were something inside him, heckling him and, in effect, the movie.
Perhaps, like all good actors, Norton wanted to give himself a challenge, and Tourette’s syndrome sounded like a good one. But, for reasons that become obvious within a minute, at most, there’s a big difference between presenting this kind of protagonist in a book and presenting him on screen.
In a book, for example, the reader can assume that, in every dramatic scene, the hero is probably twitching and blurting away, as usual, but that the writer is not telling us about it because it’s not essential information at that moment. In a movie, however, we’re looking right at the guy, so if he goes more than a minute or two without a spasm, we wonder why. Even if we’re happy that he stopped, we’re dreading and expecting him to do it again, and in “Motherless Brooklyn,” he always does it again. And again.
Yet even this spectacle of Norton trying to guide himself to a disease-driven Academy Award might have been tolerable, if only the story had some drive. Essentially, the movie is about a murder investigation, undertaken by Lionel, who poses as a newspaper reporter. The investigation takes him into a Harlem jazz club and to the secret lairs of the most powerful people in the city.
Norton’s goal here is clear and not unworthy, to use the story as an entry point for showing the variety of New York life as it existed on the eve of the modern era. But the story can’t be used in this way because it can’t sustain interest. Lionel has no reason for doing the investigation. There’s no personal motive and nothing at stake for him, either way. I suppose one might justify his curiosity in terms of his disorder, that it impels him to find the answers to every mystery. But just to say that is to acknowledge that, absent a neurological disorder, he and the audience have no reason to care about anything that’s discovered and anything that happens in the movie.
“I don’t even know what I’m after anymore,” Lionel says of his investigation. He says it two-thirds in, but long before then, we feel the same way. Still, he keeps at it for a full 144 minutes of screen time, because, if you’re going to torture an audience, half measures won’t cut it.
ED NORTON AND ERICA SWEANY STAR IN “MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN.”