In Motherless Brooklyn, Edward Norton plays Lionel, a private detective with Tourette’s Syndrome in 1950s New York. The improbability is explained away; Lionel is actually the flunky at a PI agency headed and staffed by fellow graduates of a cruel Roman Catholic orphanage. They’re his crew and they look after him. And despite the compulsive tics, Lionel is no dummy. His phonographic memory grants him total recall on everything he hears.
When the agency’s head, Frank (Bruce Willis), is murdered, Lionel does what any good dick will do in the Dashiell Hammett-Raymond Chandler universe: Duty bound, he goes out into the world seeking the killer, even if the search leads into a labyrinth of deceit and danger.
Norton, who also wrote and directed the movie, based Motherless Brooklyn on Jonathan Lethem’s novel but transposes it to a film noir setting. He gives a bravura performance, swiveling like a man on a bar stool—stutters segue into lucidity and then to obscene jabbering and back again to lucidity. The performance threatens to overwhelm the story and become the story. In an age when people were shut away in asylums for unconventional behavior, how would Tourette’s really play out in the hardboiled world of gangsters and gumshoes?
However, the background for Motherless Brooklyn is drawn from reality. The swaggering yet strangely awkward Building Commissioner, Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin in full jerk mode), is based on an infamous public official. Robert Moses built bridges still crucial today but tore down swaths of New York from the 1930s through the ’60s to make way for “progress.” In Motherless Brooklyn, he’s a man of Pharaonic ambition and Stalinist ruthlessness. One of the film’s pivotal scenes occurs in Randolph’s cavernous office where the “master builder” confronts Lionel the dissident. Randolph was a true believer in his grand visions for the future, a high-rise utopia linked by freeways and built on his own will to power.
Randolph is depicted as addicted to control, not money, and yet is surrounded by a network of predatory real-estate swindlers and eminent-domain abusers. Their designs are hidden inside file cabinets of paperwork and public documents; their scheme suggests the plot of Chinatown changed from water to asphalt and transposed from the orange groves of L.A. County to the boroughs of New York.
Motherless Brooklyn boasts a supporting cast up to their task. Willem Dafoe gives a strong performance as an angry agitator with more than a few secrets. Cherry Jones is convincing as Randolph’s foe, Gabby Horowitz, based on a real thorn-in-Moses’ side, urban-activist Jane Jacobs. There are excellent scenes inside a Harlem nightclub where a song composed for the occasion by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke was arranged for a ’50s-style combo by Wynton Marsalis.
As is usually the case in contemporary films set in the past, there are historical slip-ups. Horowitz’s assistant, Laura (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), complains that Latinos are among Randolph’s victims. Problem: The word Latino wasn’t coined until 20 years after the story’s setting. Norton’s use of Lionel’s hardboiled voiceovers, carrying some of the narrative’s weight instead of editing and dialogue, was a device the best films noir from the classic era deployed much more sparingly. The best scenes from Motherless Brooklyn show resistance to the arrogance of unchecked power. Randolph, like many tech-giants today, are fixated on their own future visions and abstractions of perfection. Never mind the people in the way of their world. They can clear out.
