New York City holds a big mystery. Lionel “Brooklyn” Essrog (Edward Norton) is a private investigator with Tourette syndrome, who takes on a case left behind by his boss, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), with nothing to go on but a ‘coloured woman’ and information that someone doesn’t want to get out. Essrog describes his debilitating compulsion as like having ‘shards of glass in the brain’, that manifest in Brooklyn rattling off nonsense phrases and having to repeat actions, like lighting matches over and over again until they make the right sound. His case takes him all across New York – to a jazz club in Harlem, and to community rallies in Brooklyn and Queens, where the people hope to stop Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin) from ripping down poorer areas of New York for his building projects. For Edward Norton’s first serious directorial effort in nearly twenty years, Motherless Brooklyn boasts a terrific cast, also including the likes of Willem Dafoe, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones, Michael K. Williams, and Leslie Mann.
An agitated Edward Norton in the first scene had me concerned we might be in for a long awkward ride, but Brooklyn’s compulsions soon become seamless. ‘Never go full retard’, as actor Kirk Lazarus told us in Tropic Thunder, because it’s not fun to watch a sound man twitch, but Brooklyn also conveys enough heart and mind to have us on his side. At around two hours and twenty minutes, Motherless Brooklyn can feel long; it takes it’s time outlaying the mystery, but I was never bored. This movie revs into gear around the twenty-minute mark and delivers. Bruce Willis fits quite well into the mentor role, with his characterisation containing shades of Kevin Spacey in Baby Driver. When I see Bruce Willis, I don’t often think ‘nurturing’, but he does have a little twinkle in his eye for his mentally defective friend, and Brooklyn is a better version of himself because of it. In fact, nobody cares about Brooklyn’s ticks; he keeps apologising for it, but I count at least four characters that tell him it’s okay. Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) actually laughs as his inappropriate titters, finding them cute, and calms him down while dancing to jazz in the sweetest scene. Willem Dafoe, as a ruffled old man who might know more than he’s letting on, seems to be too easily providing important information for Brooklyn’s case early on, but it comes full circle and he ends up having a purpose for appearing so vocally loose. But the star of the show for me has got to be Alec Baldwin – the character introduction and the efficient monologues help him encapsulate a villain that is evil as sin and realistically realised. He is as menacing as the best James Bond villains, and could be a real person (which is just a damn discredit to the human race, really). Randolph is power-driven and hungry, but he’s one of those baddies who makes sense when he speaks and makes you question where you sit in the world.
The only negative I may have found is that I couldn’t help thinking that Edward Norton’s character might’ve been slightly more mouth-watering if he was cast younger. There’s nothing wrong with Norton’s capability, yet I felt the script was trying to channel the sound of something like Fight Club in the early stages of the movie, and the narrator character in Fight Club gives us a greater sense of aimlessness due to his youth. Brooklyn already has a few things working against him – his lack of knowledge and power of the city, and his disruptive impulses – but in later scenes, particularly with Laura and Randolph, I felt a fledging investigator lean of life experience would have added another layer to the challenge and enhanced his point of view on the events occurring; someone like Ansel Elgort sprung to mine while I was watching it. Brooklyn, as he is, hasn’t had to step out of his boss’s shadow before now, and is seen as the lowest rung at the detective agency, so it isn’t much of a change to make him more inexperienced than he already is – perhaps you would have to rework some late exchanges with Tony Vermonte (Bobby Cannavale) where they talk as relative equals at the detective agency, to have Brooklyn now see Tony as his new boss, but that’s about it. Brooklyn communicates a real sense of danger in navigating Randolph in their few scenes together, like an injured gazelle would cower around a brooding bloody-toothed lion, and I just feel the tension could have been even greater if Brooklyn was further outmatched due to youth.
Motherless Brooklyn is a very impressive directorial achievement from Edward Norton. He’s got the film noir genre down pat – the jazzy score, the costumes and men lurking in the shadows. He knows which shots to use for the right dramatic impact, and uses them all evenly to communicate his film. Motherless Brooklyn is in the same pocket as Knives Out for me; although darker in tone, if you were a fan of last year’s whodunit, then it’s not a leap to say that you’ll find quality of this movie too. I’ve got a sudden hankering to reconnect with The Adventures of Tintin; the first snoop I ever loved, and the best private eye for my little eye. I’m around 30 movies in to 2020 so far and Motherless Brooklyn is one of my favourites.
4.5
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