Aug 8

Aug 8 Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

Motherless Brooklyn adapts author Jonathan Lethem’s similarly titled bestselling novel, which netted the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, while also being singled out as Novel of the Year by various outlets, including The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Esquire. Set in contemporary New York City, the book tells the tale of Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton), a private detective with Tourette’s Syndrome. When his employer, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), is gunned down, Lionel makes it his mission to find out who killed him and why.

Edward Norton wears many hats for this adaptation: lead actor, screenwriter, director, and producer. As scribe, his first choice is to transplant the tale from the cusp of the twenty-first century to the middle of the twentieth. The shift allows Motherless Brooklyn to unfold as a film noir, which suits the story up to a point. Watching people in the 1950s react minimally to Lionel’s medical condition feels again and again like a cheat, and while Mr. Norton’s portrayal of somebody afflicted with Tourette’s may be accurate, it also frequently feels convenient. That is to say, Lionel’s involuntary tics and utterances do not occur when they would prove most inconvenient to the character—when he is moving stealthily, for example, or when a woman sleeps beside him. Part of his disorder manifests as coprolalia—the uncontrollable use of obscene or inappropriate language—but only in a single instance does one of his outbursts result in any consequences, and not anything that alters the story in a meaningful way. As a result, Lionel’s malady comes off more as a gimmick than as an important part of his character or of the plot.

And the plot strongly echoes that of Chinatown, the 1974 Academy Award winner for Best Original Screenplay, often cited as the finest film script ever written. In Motherless Brooklyn, the MacGuffin of Los Angeles’ water supply is replaced by the relentless urban construction of Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), a thinly veiled evocation of the power-hungry “master builder” Robert Moses. There’s even an illegitimate daughter. But Motherless Brooklyn, despite solid performances from its cast—which includes Willem Dafoe, Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale, and the always-good Gugu Mbatha-Raw—lacks both the draw and heft of Chinatown. It looks good, and it features numerous elements that feel as though they should add up to something, but the tale never revs up out of neutral, a fatal flaw for a film that runs nearly two and a half hours.