Direction: Edward Norton
Country: USA
Edward Norton writes, produces, directs and stars in Motherless Brooklyn, a neo-noir detective story set in 1950’s New York City. The storyline was carved out from the 1999 novel of the same name by Jonathan Lethem and follows the tortuous paths of Lionel Essrog (Norton), a private detective with Tourette’s syndrome that investigates the assassination of his cool-under-pressure mentor, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), shot dead with his own gun.
The man behind this dark curtain is Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), an autocrat obsessed with power. As a city planner, he takes control of every construction site in the city, and not even his brother, Paul (Willem Dafoe), a frustrated dreamer, copes with his ways. In the course of the investigation, Lionel locates Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an African-American activist from Harlem, who, he believes, could know something about Frank’s death. However, she was just looking to dismantle a fraudulent real estate scheme and now faces the dangers of opposing the gangster squad behind it.
Motherless Brooklyn lingers too much time in jazz numbers and attempts to romanticize what it's not romantic. Intermittently interesting at an early stage, the film keeps oscillating between solid and patchy, and eventually grows in disappointment as climaxes and thrills are taken to a minimum. The supporting performances are strong, but the machine assembled by Norton is far from well-oiled. Unfortunately, the narrative descends into retro boredom and, instead of something gripping and intellectually capable, you’ll find occasional sincerity but few emotion.
