The film Motherless Brooklyn (2019) sets itself against the backdrop of 1950s New York City with a puzzle for lead character and private detective Lionel Essrog, as played by film director Edward Norton, in the starring role. Essrog battles Tourette’s Syndrome, and as a result is taken under the wing of Frank Minna, as played by Bruce Willis, from childhood.
(Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Laura Rose, left, and Edward Norton as Lionel Essrog in the film Motherless Brooklyn).
Frank Minna sets the story in motion with a shady proposition to extort more payment for his business from businessmen whose background Minna keeps deliberately vague. Using the photographic memory of Essrog to plant puzzles for a crime solving plan for the private detective, things turning sideways for that deal reveals a story that offers a degree of potential character depth that isn’t present in many contemporary movies.
(Bruce Willis as Frank Minna, left, Willem Dafoe as Paul, center, and Alec Baldwin as Moses Randolph in the film Motherless Brooklyn).
The pieces suggest involvement by characters Paul, as played by Willem Dafoe, Laura Rose as played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Moses Randolph as played by Alec Baldwin. Randolph, a character written into the book Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, resembles power broker Robert Moses as described in the book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro. The intrigue within the movie, a project brought to the movies due to Norton, includes intrigue that in part includes character Tony Vermonte as played by Bobby Cannavale.
(Bobby Cannavale as Tony Vermonte in the film Motherless Brooklyn).
The Rotten Tomatoes listing for the film Motherless Brooklyn rightly mentions the film takes the story from the “gin-soaked jazz clubs in Harlem to the hard-edged slums of Brooklyn”. The film aims for setting a mood, a place, and a feeling of corruption fighting that works if understood through the lens of those constructs, some of which Norton seems to have added into the film’s screenplay. The film largely worked for me due to this, which leads me to my rating of 3.75-stars on a scale of one-to-five.
Matt – Wednesday, November 20, 2019
Matt Lynn Digital 