If I am being honest, and I always try to be, I wasn’t really looking forward to the new Motherless Brooklyn. The trailers, showing Edward Norton directing himself in a movie where he plays a 50s private eye’s assistant with Tourette Syndrome and a lot of familiar faces looked a lot like some kind of vanity project. And in awards season, or at least the early part of it? It sounded like a vanity project, plain and simple.
Then the reviews started coming in, and they were good. So, maybe there was more to the movie than I had initially suspected. At any rate, I did opt to see it and, happily, it is better than my initial opinion.
Based on a novel by Jonathan Lethem, Norton’s screenplay (reset to the 50s from the 90s), follows one Lionel “Freakshow” Essrog. After most of his childhood was spent in an orphanage, Lionel was taken in by private eye Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) along with a few of his orphanage friends. Lionel has bad Tourette Syndrome and maybe a touch of OCD, causing him to randomly blurt out stuff, mostly a big, loud “IF,” and twitch uncontrollably. Frank alone saw value in Lionel. Despite his flaws, Lionel is a great listener with a fantastic memory.
Things go wrong in an opening scene when Frank dies on some kind of case, but Frank has a habit of not sharing much of what he was doing with his various associates (including his wife). Lionel has a handful of clues as to what is going on, and since Frank was something of a father figure to Lionel, Lionel is going to have to somehow get his head together long enough to solve his boss and mentor’s murder and maybe bring about some justice.
So, I really liked Motherless Brooklyn. Norton gives a fine performance in what is clearly a labor of love. The set design, jazz soundtrack, costuming, and a lot of familiar if not outright famous faces including Alec Baldwin as a high-powered city commissioner and builder, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a love interest who may be involved in the case, Willem Defoe as a down-on-his-luck idealistic genius, Leslie Mann as Willis’ widow, and a couple castmembers of The Wire for good measure. Baldwin in particular gives a good, nasty performance as a man used to having his own way.
But this is really Norton’s movie. Most of these actors don’t appear all that much in the grand scheme of things. The movie, running around two and a half hours, is really Lionel’s story as he looks into Frank’s murder and what caused it. There’s some social commentary in there about the rich getting what they want over the poor and underestimating someone with a mental disorder, but the biggest problem for some will be the pacing. Me, I didn’t mind it. The style and the general tone reminded me a bit of L.A. Confidential. Maybe it was a bit long, but I really liked visiting this world and seeing what made it tick.
Then again, I tend to like noir, so that may be a factor. Regardless, I’d recommend Motherless Brooklyn for anyone looking for a good period mystery with a lot of attention to detail. It may still be a vanity project for Norton, but at least he’s talented enough to pull off a good one.
Grade: B+
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