I saw Motherless Brooklyn early last
week. In theaters since the start of the month, it almost entirely evaporated
from area theaters not long after I caught it, probably because it had tanked
at the box office.
What a pity. Film noir is filled with works that
didn’t attract audiences when they first came out, only to find greater
appreciation at revival houses, on TV or DVD (e.g., Touch of Evil, Kiss Me
Deadly). I hope that will be the fate of this homage to such great
detective stories by the actor Edward Norton, who spent nearly two
decades crafting this adaptation of the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award winner for fiction by Jonathan Lethem.
Unfortunately the movie was overlooked amid more
high-profile releases such as Frozen 2 and The Irishman. But it
is so lovingly and carefully made that I think viewers will be pleasantly
surprised when they have a chance to see it at home—preferably at home on DVD,
when a director’s commentary will show all that went into every frame of the
film.
Besides writing the screenplay and directing, Norton
has reserved the central role for himself: Lionel Essrog, whose Tourette's
syndrome would, under normal circumstances, render him a “Human Freakshow.” But
he has been rescued from the orphanage St. Vincent’s Home for Boys by Frank
Minna (played by Bruce Willis), a private eye who, sensing potential in Lionel’s uncanny memory, makes him one of "Minna's Men" of field operatives.
When Frank ends up stabbed to death on a case gone awry, Lionel—partly
guilt-ridden over his inability to prevent the killing, partly unable to stop
scratching at this case with too many loose ends—determines to ferret out the
truth.
The twentysomething years it took Norton to bring
this project to fruition will, to some extent, stretch audiences’ belief that
the 50-year-old actor could play an orphan not long out of such an institution,
but his customary skill (and, at this point, still relative youthfulness) allow
him to get away with this, barely. More problematic is his treatment of Lionel’s
disability.
The film’s treatment of Lionel’s disability is
problematic. It’s not because Norton’s intentions (i.e., depicting virtue as
the result as a result of battling through a handicap rather than merely
possessing it) are misplaced, but because his depiction is both far too
incessant (a few times would be enough to give viewers an idea) and
anachronistic (this being the 1950s, every character might normally be expected
to recoil in confusion and disgust, rather than react with the understanding
that several display here).
Norton has switched the period of this tale from the
1990s of Lethem’s novel to 1957 New York, a move advantageous for several
reasons: the time is, more or less, the end of the black-and-white era that
classic films in the genre evoked; it allows him to evoke thinly fictionalized
real figures from the time, such as relentless urban visionary planner Robert
Moses, community activist Jane Jacobs, and jazz great Miles Davis; and it
represents, much like now, an era when massive development in Gotham could
transform the city landscape, even as it disrupted en masse the lives of
citizens in its path.
In depicting a villain with power over civic and
commercial life that even the relentless private eye at its heart can’t begin
to grasp, Motherless Brooklyn bears more than a slight resemblance to Chinatown,
the Roman Polanski classic that fueled the neo-noir movement in earnest. As the
Moses character (here called Moses Randolph, head of “The Borough Authority,”
analogous to the builder’s actual agency), Alec Baldwin projects a bull-necked
intensity possessed, from all accounts, by his real-life counterpart.
Beatings dished out by hoods, scary encounters with
underworld giants, a hero with dangerous encounters with drinking and drugs:
All of these elements of Motherless Brooklyn will be familiar to fans of
The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, along with a hero who
fulfills Raymond Chandler’s classic description of his protagonist in this
fallen world:
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not
himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is
everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.
He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by
inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”
Lionel might be indefatigable, amid an environment
every bit as threatening as the one in which Chandler’s Philip Marlowe trod,
but he has an affliction that puts considerable distance between him and
Marlowe or, for that matter, Sam Spade. He is forced, because of his case of
Tourette’s, to blurt out words constantly unintended, garbled, obscene, and
embarrassing.
Lonely and struggling to make sense of the thoughts
(especially clues) in his head, Lionel is drawn to another gifted person marginalized
by society: African-American lawyer Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a Harlem
community activist who finds herself mysteriously threatened as Lionel’s
investigation gains momentum.
As Lionel treks through locations as diverse as
Brooklyn, Harlem jazz joints, the Plaza Hotel, the New York Public Library's
main Midtown branch, and Washington Square Park, he seeks a place where he and
Laura might be safe from the greed and corruption they find everywhere.
Although Norton makes particularly good use of
assets probably required of film noir—often dark, somber cinematography
(courtesy of Dick Pope) and a moody, evocative soundtrack (with contributions
from the likes of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Wynton Marsalis and Daniel Pemberton),
he shines in what is, naturally, an inherent strength of his own—extracting the
most from fellow cast members.
I can’t think of any actor here who is seriously
miscast, and some particularly stand out: not just Willis, Baldwin, and Mbatha-Raw,
but also Willem Dafoe (as Randolph’s brilliant ne’er-do-well brother), Michael
Kenneth Williams (as the Davis-like “Trumpet Man”) and Leslie Mann (as Minna's none-too-sorrowful widow).
In moving the era of Lethem’s novel back four
decades, Norton has transformed contemporary film noir into historical
detective fiction. But his vision remains, for all that, a distant mirror on
the greed and corruption of our own time—and the displacement that too often
results from notions of “urban renewal.”
It would be a shame if that message becomes obscured at Oscar time, when
Academy voters frequently nominate performers who take on roles featuring the
physically and mentally challenged. Norton’s labor of love is worth honoring
far beyond that limited perspective.
