Moth­er­less Brooklyn

There’s an aston­ish­ing scene in Moth­er­less Brook­lyn where Edward Norton’s gumshoe nar­ra­tor, who has Tourette syn­drome, chas­es a lead in the case he’s work­ing to a small, smoke-filled jazz club in Harlem. Pulling up a stool at the far end of the bar next to the cramped back-cor­ner stage, he begins to twitch and scat in serendip­i­tous har­mo­ny with the music, his every tic and yip match­ing the house band’s off-beat groove. For the first time in his life, Lionel Essrog’s neu­ro­log­i­cal afflic­tion sud­den­ly makes sense.

If only the same could be said of the film itself. Adapt­ing Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 nov­el of the same name, this is Norton’s sec­ond direc­to­r­i­al effort after 2000’s Nora Ephron-lite love tri­an­gle com­e­dy Keep­ing the Faith. Hav­ing also tak­en on the lead role and screen­writ­ing duties, his long over­due fol­low-up has the dis­tinct air of a van­i­ty project doomed by its maker’s over­am­bi­tion. To be fair to Nor­ton, with so many dis­parate mov­ing parts and so many weighty themes at work, it’s a won­der he’s man­aged to deliv­er some­thing even remote­ly coherent.

Just as Ess­rog is not your aver­age pri­vate dick, Moth­er­less Brook­lyn is a less-than-con­ven­tion­al post­mod­ern crime noir whose cen­tral mur­der plot (nice to see Bruce Willis earn­ing his keep for a change) is essen­tial­ly win­dow dress­ing for a stern-faced exam­i­na­tion of New York City’s murky munic­i­pal past. Specif­i­cal­ly, the film address­es the sys­tem­at­ic dis­man­tling of inner-city com­mu­ni­ties dur­ing America’s post­war boom years, tak­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly dim view of the men who ruth­less­ly exploit­ed the poor­est and most vul­ner­a­ble cit­i­zens under the ban­ner of ​‘progress’.

Fol­low­ing a mys­te­ri­ous paper trail in the wake of his boss’ death, our hero even­tu­al­ly finds his way into the mar­ble-decked offices of Moses Ran­dolph (Alec Bald­win), who dis­plays all the bluff and blus­ter of a career politi­cian but is in fact an unelect­ed pub­lic offi­cial with grand designs on remod­el­ling New York regard­less of the cost (mon­e­tary or oth­er­wise) to the local taxpayer.

Ran­dolph is a bare­ly-dis­guised proxy for Robert Moses, the pow­er­ful town plan­ner whose urban renew­al project saw scores of work­ing-class peo­ple – most­ly black and eth­nic minor­i­ty – dis­placed from their homes through­out the 1940s and ​’50s. (For more on this sub­ject, seek out Robert Caro’s excel­lent 1974 biog­ra­phy of Moses, ​‘The Pow­er Broker’.)

Fas­ci­nat­ing though it is to see Nor­ton con­tin­ue Caro’s work in scru­ti­n­is­ing the lega­cy of one of Gotham’s most influ­en­tial and con­tro­ver­sial fig­ures, Norton’s anti-cap­i­tal­ist mes­sage is under­mined by his film’s sen­ti­men­tal ten­den­cies. Even if you can stom­ach the roman­tic sub­plot between Ess­rog and Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s com­mu­ni­ty activist – sound­tracked by a maudlin bal­lad per­formed by, of all duos, Thom Yorke and Flea – and a still more baf­fling fam­i­ly reunion sub­plot involv­ing Willem Dafoe’s crotch­ety lon­er, you may well find your­self dis­tract­ed by Norton’s full-tilt performance.

This film wants us to come away think­ing about the unjust and racist foun­da­tions upon which the Amer­i­can Dream was built, but instead it’s the image of Nor­ton ski-do-be-bop-bap­ping in that smoky jazz club that lingers.