Motherless Brooklyn review – highly watchable with an air of melancholy
Most actors, at some point, fancy a crack at directing, in the spirit of “anything some hack can do, I can do better”. The results are distinctly mixed. For every Clint Eastwood, there is a Nicolas Cage, whose entirely bizarre directorial debut Sonny can, in retrospect, be seen as the beginning of where it all went wrong in his career. Yet there were few odder choices made than by Edward Norton with his own first effort as director, Keeping the Faith, an innocuous but bland romantic comedy. Given that Norton was acquiring a reputation as a fiery wunderkind of American cinema, showing his extraordinary versatility with the likes of Fight Club, American History X and Primal Fear, it seemed anything but a passion project.
His newest effort is Motherless Brooklyn, a long-gestating adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel. Two decades in the making, it arrives in Britain trailing commercial disappointment in the US in its wake. It isn’t at all hard to see why. The cast, although starry, mainly consists of middle-aged male actors arguably somewhere past their commercial heyday, and there is a limited market for Fifties-set crime dramas with downbeat atmospheres. Nor is it a flawless piece of work, with several issues that a more experienced director might have addressed successfully. But it’s an intriguing and highly watchable film with an air of melancholy and sadness to it that lifts material that, at times, feels distinctly by-the-book.
Its lead character, at least, is an unusual and intriguing one. Lionel Essrog (played, inevitably, by Norton) is a low-level private investigator with Tourette’s Syndrome, prone to humiliating and violent verbal explosions at inopportune moments. A lonely orphan who lives with his cat, he is employed by Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), a more experienced detective and a surrogate father of sorts to him. When Minna is killed, Essrog is reluctantly launched into a quest to discover why and how his mentor was murdered. It will involve a civil rights lawyer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a down-at-heel genius (Willem Dafoe) and, most potently, an all-powerful city planning supremo, Moses Randolph, who is a barely disguised version of Robert Moses, and is played, with unusual commitment and menace, by Alec Baldwin.
Baldwin’s casting should indicate that there are obvious parallels between the narrative and contemporary America. Norton, who also wrote the screenplay, does not lose any time at making his anger clear at the toxicity of a society in which the poor and undesirable are, quite literally, moved out of the way so that the rich can get richer. As a piece of barbed social commentary, this is effective stuff, although only the most patient of viewers will be delighted to learn that this goes on for nearly two and a half hours. As a mystery, it is less successful; the final revelations owe far too much to Chinatown for comfort, but also leave the audience with a sense of “And?”. There is a tender almost-romance between Norton and Mbatha-Raw, but this is not a film otherwise preoccupied with human relationships. Most of the characters are flawed, venal and selfish, only out for themselves and blind to the larger problems that their actions are creating. As someone once so famously said, “Remind you of anyone?”
Norton’s direction is, alas, workmanlike rather than inspired. Still there are some satisfying moments of cinematic bravura, not least an early scene when Essrog, smoking crack in order to help him relax, imagines himself drifting down into an endless, watery abyss. By far the most interesting and original contribution here comes from the composer Daniel Pemberton, whose score combines elements of contemporary jazz with the distorted, troubling sounds of Kid A/Amnesiac-era Radiohead. (Thom Yorke, who was originally asked to do the score, contributes a sad, plangent ballad, Daily Battles, which recurs throughout the film in various forms.) It enlivens any scene that it is used in, most specifically a moment when Essrog visits Penn Station to collect a crucial document from a locker; Pemberton’s music oozes and hums with disorientation and menace, and the narrative gains added momentum and interest as a result.
If the film doesn’t entirely succeed, at least its intentions and ideas are constantly engaging and provocative, which is more than can be said for the majority of its peers. Norton himself is excellent, playing a more vulnerable, pathetic character than he usually takes on. Aficionados of Fifties costume and production design will be hugely impressed by the way that a relatively low-budget film can make the era seem so vivid. It is a shame that Motherless Brooklyn is unlikely to be any more than a curiosity, but it’s very much worth seeing, nonetheless, and the air of gentle sadness stays with the viewer long after the plot’s machinations are forgotten.