Motherless Brooklyn Takes Aim at the Villains Who Shaped America
Edward Norton’s auteur adaptation is a total teardown of the novel.
“We’re taught Lord Acton’s axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. … What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do.” —Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Edward Norton hasn’t been completely absent from the silver screen, but he’s mostly only been appearing on the margins, as a cameo villain or a voice. As it turns out, he’s been spending the last several years going for the moviemaking auteur’s triple crown of writing, directing and starring in his own feature. Now that Motherless Brooklyn is out, we’ve got a better look at what’s important to Norton.
As Paste’s review mentioned, that adds up to a competent and at times very fun noir homage. A lot of what it does is standard-issue noir, from the hard-boiled patter and the damsel in distress to the presumption that its flawed, cynical hero can’t truly win in a rotten world. What’s noteworthy is who the villains are, what that villainy actually is, and who it actually hurts
Like the villains of his film, Norton tears down what he can’t use in adapting the book. Norton dumps the 1990s setting of the novel, transplanting the story to the 1950s and peopling it with the same kind of damaged post-war heavies you find in any Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler story. Norton plays Lionel, “Brooklyn” to his fellow gumshoes and “Bailey” to the malicious voice lurking about in his head. He’s got Tourette’s Syndrome, the universally played-for-laughs neurological condition which can cause a person to spout random gibberish. The movie treats it as an actual, serious affliction that severely affects Brooklyn’s life.
Brooklyn and his fellow PIs all work under the direction of Frank Minna, a typically grizzled Bruce Willis. When he tries to bargain for a piece of blackmail above his pay grade, Minna is killed and Brooklyn and his hapless comrades are left to try to figure out what it all means without their wise old leader’s guidance. Determined to do right by the man who saved him from an orphanage and saw value in his strangeness, Brooklyn hits the mean streets of New York to solve the case.
What he discovers is a conspiracy by the city’s shadowy power broker Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, in a role that fits him entirely too well) to seize black neighborhoods and turn them into parks built by construction firms that pay him kickbacks. But when Brooklyn discovers Randolph is targeting a young community activist (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), the detective suspects there’s more to it than merely removing another inconvenient do-gooder.
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