Edward Norton had just finished filming David Fincher's "Fight Club" in the fall of 1999 when production company New Line Cinema offered to film a recent novel by Jonathan Lethem. "Motherless Brooklyn" was the name of this critically acclaimed book. Norton showed interest in trying to change over to directing. Because of the ambitious project but then for various reasons, nothing at first, is now a romantic priest and rabbinic comedy with Ben Stiller ("Keeping the Faith", 2000) as the first directorial work in Norton's filmography.
Twenty years later, "Motherless Brooklyn" still finds its way onto the screen. Norton is now already 50 - and thus clearly too old for the main character Lionel Essrog, if one uses Lethem's novel as a binding script. On the other hand, why should an adaptation not allow broad interpretation room for interpretation? The orthodoxy of a faithfulness of a true-to-the-original faith of the author ultimately only results in the complaint that a film adaptation does not do justice to the literary complexity.
In the case of "Motherless Brooklyn," Norton had already agreed with Lethem 20 years ago that his film adaptation should not be in the late 90s, but in the 1950s - and thus in that epoch, Lethem's novel in his Pulp-Sound, in which nostalgic noir-gestures and anachronistic narrative tropics constantly lead as a historical-cultural layer.
It tells a detective story revolving around a junior investigator suffering from Tourette syndrome. Growing up as an orphan, Essrog is discovered as a talent by Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who runs an unglamorous detective agency in Brooklyn, and from then on patronized. Turning a marginalized teenager into a private investigator with a special talent: an extraordinary range of observation and a photographic memory are used for detective pattern recognition.
These skills need to be harnessed as Essrog's mentor and surrogate father gets into a dubious story that costs him his life. Norton takes over and plays Lethem's main character, but transfers it into a largely re-imagined narrative about corrupt politicians and city planners.
"Motherless Brooklyn"
USA 2019
Written and directed by Edward Norton
Performers: Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Alec Baldwin
Production: Class 5 Films, MWM Studios
Rental: Warner Bros.
Length: 145 minutes
Theatrical release: December 12, 2019
The focus here is Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), which is reminiscent of Robert Moses, the equally influential as controversial city planner of New York from 1930 to 1968. An almost autocratic reigning apologist of the "car-friendly" city, but was also accused Bridges prefers to have built so that the inhabitants of predominantly African-American quarters with public transport difficult to reach Manhattan.
Unfortunately, Norton decided to repress the political level around institutional and infrastructural racism, which could also be related to current debates on urban planning, in a certain way: Randolph's racism is and has no system, but above all private-pathological reasons. In addition, Alec Baldwin may also enjoy the role of the charismatic-visionary villain somewhat too ostentatiously - there is a certain complacency in his playing, which is more akin to the actor than the character.
Norton also reaches its limits. As a follower of the Lethem novel, one does not have to mourn the jazzed-over vocal acrobatics, the punitive idiosyncrasy of a first-person narrator entangled in self-talk and mind games , in order to find the conventionally reduced nervousness reduced to two or three schematic ticks in Norton's portrayal.
In the video: The trailer for "Motherless Brooklyn"
Warner Bros.
That Essrog lives with an anarchist in his head, as he says himself, is ultimately limited to dating barriers. So, "Motherless Brooklyn" evolves into a fast-paced period piece that will surely tastefully design a fifties-new-york, but otherwise develop little drive. Even if you like the vintage cars, the Harlem jazz club atmosphere and the computer-generated old Penn Station, you still have the feeling that a real Robert Moses biopic might have been more interesting.