Norton crafts a ‘Chinatown’-ish tale in ‘Motherless Brooklyn’

Jonathan Lethem’s novel about a private eye with Tourette’s syndrome, “Motherless Brooklyn,” starts with a brilliant burst of uncontrolled profanity and an explanation of its protagonist’s condition.
“Words sally out of the abundance of my brain to course over the surface of the globe, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They’re associate degree invisible army on operation, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm.”
Lethem lets loose a riot of language across the next pages, remake a classic whodunit with associate degree uncontrollable flow of words. In his intelligent, fascinating and spinoff adaptation of “Motherless borough,” Edward Norton has something tidier in mind.
Norton, who wrote, directed, made and stars within the film, has shifted the story from the ’90s to the ’50s, taking a then-contemporary twist on an old genre and sending it back to its late-noir peak, alongside all the period-appropriate trench coats, automobiles, and Venetian blinds. Norton first sought out the book more than 20 years ago — this is a longtime “passion project” finally come to fruition — and it’s clear that he wanted to enlarge the story’s ambitions. He’s after a “Chinatown” for New York.
Lionel Essrog (Norton) is a non-public dick whose mentor Frank Minna (Bruce Willis, whose infrequent look in movies currently has solely heightened his powerful presence), adopted Lionel and raised him in his private investigator business. When Minna is killed within the film’s gap scenes, Essrog throws himself into discovering the murderers, whipping up his fellow detectives — Tony (Bobby Cannavale), Gilbert (Ethan Suplee) and Danny (Dallas Roberts) — to affix within the search.
Essrog, now and then donning the gloss of a newsman, follows a path of clues that leads him across the metropolis and into a broad hall conspiracy that rises to the penthouse-heights of New York power. Along with the means, square measure journeys through a not-yet-razed Penn Station, a handsome Washington sq. Park and an important Harlem jazz club (where Michael K. Williams plays a trumpet player). He befriends a black professional person, Laura Ross (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who helps him realize the full scope of the corruption revolving around “slum clearance” policies of redevelopment, and how Minna figures into it.
Norton is leading Essrog into foundational midcentury New York history. Just as Jake Gittes unwittingly uncovered the water supply sins on which Los Angeles was built in “Chinatown,” “Motherless Brooklyn” winds its way through the neighborhood-destroying freeway laying of Robert Moses’ New York. “Motherless Brooklyn” is additional indebted, ultimately, to Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” than Lethem’s novel.
The Henry Martyn Robert Moses legendary creature here is called Moses Randolph and vie with perfection by Alec Baldwin, who’s making something of a habit of playing New York’s real-estate villains. In one fine moment with an oversized map of the latest royal family behind him, he insists that he’s not above the law, “I’m ahead of it.”
To some, this well-known history (there is also a Jane Jacobs-like figure protesting Randolph’s brute-force policies) is too familiar to be particularly intriguing. It’s a bit sort of a gumshoe wandering into a textbook. But not everyone seems to be deeply versed in Moses’ overwhelming imprint on the big apple town. And what makes “Motherless Brooklyn” respectable and even novel is that this affixation of social history onto a genre tale. It’s not specifically commonplace in today’s movies to be taken down a hollow regarding urban development. It’s a praiseworthy impulse, and Norton’s film provides a welcome reminder of what we’ve been missing.
There’s additional to be gained from that facet of “Motherless Brooklyn” than the showcase of Norton’s performance. The actor, United Nations agency magnificently vie a stammering schizophrenic in “Primal concern,” largely pulls it off with a full diet of tics, mannerisms, jerks and blurts. “It makes Maine say funny things, but I’m not trying to be funny,” Essrog, nicknamed “Freakshow,” tells someone. But the performance ne'er appears far more than associate degree acting challenge.
Norton, who last directed the 2000 romantic comedy “Keeping the Faith,” has made a resolutely sturdy movie, filled with excellent actors (Willem Dafoe is also in the mix) and composed — Dick Pope (“Mr. Turner”) provides the slick and shadowy motion-picture photography — with a vivid sympathize with the big apple. “Motherless Brooklyn” is completed to a tolerable degree that you just want it had smitten out on its path, instead of crib from Henry Martyn Robert Towne and Roman Polanski. It’s hard to forget it, but that’s “Chinatown.”