After his mentor is murdered, private detective Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton) wants to know who was responsible.
A trail of clues lead Lionel straight to the top of the city’s shadowy power structure, Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin).
This movie is made up of things I usually take as warning signs:
It is a passion project.
It is over two hours long.
It is directed by an actor who plays a character with an impairment.
These qualifiers usually put me off. And yet…
I kind of love this movie.
I have not read the book this movie is based on, and I am not that interested in reading it. Mostly because the elements that I most gravitated to - the period setting and Randolph Moses character - are not in the book.
Apparently Edward Norton came up with the idea to reset the action to the fifties, and combine the book’s premise with the story of Robert Moses, the inspiration for Randolph, who was the master builder/municipal dictator of New York City.
A few years ago, I read Fear City, the account of New York’s transformation in the mid-seventies to the place it is today, where the city’s modest welfare state was replaced by an environment that centred the city’s financial elites.
While it is fictional, because the New York this movie takes place in no longer exists, it adds another dimension to the movie.
And while the movie was long, it never feels that baggy. I would have to watch it again, but the bigger canvas does allow for more world-building.
The mystery is fine - the film shows its hand by trying to build up Randolph early, so the final twist is somewhat easy to spot.
The movie wants to be like Chinatown, in terms of showing the sordid underbelly that underpins the city’s expansion.
The real-life Robert Moses famously used his powers to segregate the city (the famous example is building low bridges over parkways so that poorer residents - including black people and other communities - would not be able to take buses to access parks and beaches). Norton uses this context as the basis for the film’s central mystery, and Lionel’s friendship with Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a local black activist.
In the lead, Norton goes to town with various tics and other physicality. Maybe it is because I knew he was playing a character with an impairment, I was ready for his shtick.
While there is a sense of Oscar thirst to the performance, he is not as big of a caricature as I expected. As the movie progresses, Norton dials back on the tics, and I began to wonder whether the movie would have worked without his character conceit - while it is a key aspect of the book, on the evidence of this adaptation, it feels like a hat on a hat.
The cast is solid. Baldwin brings a thuggish authority as the main heavy, Mbatha-Raw and Willem Dafoe are good in their roles, and Bruce Willis - in one of his most recent appearances, brings a weary charm as Lionel’s mentor.
Motherless Brooklyn feels like a sturdy, weighty drama from a few decades ago. It has a capable cast, a meaty period setting and a familiar genre structure. It is a bit long, and Norton’s performance is - something, but overall, it is worth a look.
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