Edward Norton adapted the screenplay for, directed and stars in the atmospheric mystery Motherless Brooklyn. A detective’s partner is killed, and his search for the killers plunges him into a web of intrigue. It’s a slow burn paranoid thriller, along the lines of Chinatown, although not nearly as good and set in the New York City of the early 1950s and not nearly as good.
Norton gets the postwar NYC pretty much perfect. If you love the automobiles of the period, especially the Plymouths and Chevrolets, you’ll be in heaven.
The paranoia comes from the omnipotence of master urban redeveloper Robert Moses (under a different name in Motherless Brooklyn). It’s actually pretty accurate history, if a bit esoteric for popular entertainment.
Norton plays novelist Jonathan Lethem’s private detective Lionel Essrog, who has Tourette’s syndrome. Tourette’s was even less understood in the America of the early 1950s, so that creates some fodder, along with the fact that detectives who have to sneak around are not well-served by involuntary outbursts. Norton is always good, but it’s hard not to see this as a gimmick performance.
I really liked Bruce Willis as a more seasoned detective. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays the woman who must be saved, and we all want her saved. Alec Baldwin twirls virtual mustaches as the villainous Moses character, Willem Dafoe is very good as a haunted character; he is wearing his beard from The Lighthouse, but happily not the Long John Silver accent.
Motherless Brooklyn was a labor of love for Norton, and he loves it too much to edit it. The story could be told better in a movie 30 minutes shorter, One nightclub scene in particular goes on for too, too long. If you have two-and-a-half hours on a cold winter’s night, you could do worse than to stream it.