Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn Coasts on Lazy Noir Nostalgia

Even though Motherless Brooklyn is just the second film Edward Norton has directed — his first was 2000’s Keeping the Faith — he began developing the project 17 years ago. Adapted from Jonathan Lethem’s novel about the character Lionel Essrog, a private investigator with Tourette syndrome, the film is clearly Norton’s passion project. So why did he throw out almost all of Lethem’s story to make it a period piece (the book was set in 1999, when it was published) that faintly echoes better neo-noir exercises like L.A. Confidential?

Lionel — played by Norton — works in 1959 Brooklyn, which is rapidly gentrifying. His mentor Frank (Bruce Willis) is shot in one of the opening scenes, but manages to utter the words “Formosa” and “colored girl” before dying, apparent clues about his death. Lionel rapidly gets in over his head, meeting a jazz musician loosely inspired by Miles Davis (Michael K. Williams), falling in love with activist Laura (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and realizing the extent of city planner Moses Randolph’s power to screw over African Americans. 

Motherless Brooklyn superficially evokes paranoid, sprawling conspiratorial narratives like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice and David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake. For all the weed that Lionel smokes (it helps keep his Tourette symptoms under control), the film remains steadfastly grounded. Despite the period setting, its aspirations towards political commentary — combined with a lack of ability to pull it off and complacency about its themes — are all too 2019.

The parallels between architect Randolph (played by Alec Baldwin) and Trump couldn’t be more obvious. Baldwin, who has of course been portraying the president on recent seasons of Saturday Night Live, luxuriates in an easy smugness that he can deliver expertly. But Motherless Brooklyn goes so far as to have Moses actually say the words “I moved on her,” just in case anyone missed where the film’s depiction of the abuse of political power points. And as Norton has subtly indicated through his name, the character also resembles builder Robert Moses, who greatly influenced mid-20th-century New York City.

An earlier 2019 release, Christian Petzold’s Transit, is a master class in blending two time periods to show the continuity between the horrors of the past and a still-unfolding present. The problem with Motherless Brooklyn is that it seems nostalgic for a period whose racism it continually points out. It spends a lazy 144 minutes in a cozy noir fantasia, with little regard for forward momentum.

Motherless Brooklyn’s social conscience feels cosmetic, and one might suspect that Norton was attracted to the project because it gave him the opportunity to portray a challenging character who’s beset by various tics. The characters surrounding him come back to life only to serve as props for Norton’s resistance-kitsch costume party.