(Edward
Norton)
If
you loved Roman Polanski’s detective masterpiece, “Chinatown”, you’ll feel
right at home with Edward Norton’s 20-year labour of love. (8/10 Review by
Patrick Compton)
It would be hard to find a film quite like
this long, brooding detective drama, written, directed and starring Edward
Norton. At 144 minutes, Motherless
Brooklyn is probably too long for modern appetites, and its plot does
digress on occasion, but in general I found it an absorbing, beautifully shot
noir drama with a tremendous central performance from Norton himself.
Based on the 1999 best-selling novel by
Jonathan Lethem, Norton has shifted the film back in time to 1957 because of
the hard-boiled dialogue which, he says, makes that period a more appropriate
setting for the action.
Norton plays the fascinating and unusual
Lionel Essrog, an idiosyncratic member of a small detective agency in New York
who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome. This is a nervous disorder that causes
people to make sudden movements or sounds, called tics, that they can't control.
For example, someone with Tourette’s may blurt out words they don't intend to
say. Although Lionel suffers from this – a problem often played for sympathetic
laughs – he also has a photographic memory and the kind of analytic brain that
are the perfect requirements for a successful detective.
The movie has a fairly complex narrative,
but the plot’s central plank is the murder of Lionel’s boss (a vivid cameo from
Bruce Willis), Frank, who falls foul of some (initially) mysterious thugs
attached to the New York municipality. Lionel, an obsessive, is determined to
find out why his mentor was killed.
This compulsion leads him slowly down the
main road, with pauses for a number of digressions down some narrative side
streets. This leaves plenty of time for airing issues like the clearing of
slums, the gentrification of suburbs and corruption in high places.
For some, this may require powers of
patience that they don’t possess, but I was totally sucked into the world that
Norton has created, including superb production design. The actor-director
receives expert help from cinematographer Dick Pope (Mr Turner) who shoots
Brooklyn and Harlem in beautiful greys and browns and musical director Wynton
Marsalis who provides a memorably jazzy score.
Aside from Norton, whose character knits
the film together, there are strong performances from Alec Baldwin as a ruthless,
visionary town planner, Gugu Mbatha Raw, who gives a magnetic portrait of a
black lawyer and activist, and Willem Dafoe as the opposite side to Baldwin’s
dark coin. There’s also Peter Gray Lewis as the sort of mayor you want to hurl
rotten fruit at.
Motherless
Brooklyn – once Lionel’s nickname – is a dark,
witty, intelligent drama that combines a classic gumshoe narrative with the
kind of political issue that still has contemporary relevance, namely the
destruction of so-called “slum” communities, primarily occupied by poor
African-Americans, to make way for upper middle-class neighbourhoods.
Motherless
Brooklyn is currently showing at the Gateway cinema
complex in Durban. – Patrick Compton
Posts
