Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

Stephen Campbell December 21, 2019

★ 5/10

**_Looks great and is well acted, but the pacing is turgid_** >_I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelettes without breaking eggs._ - Robert Moses; Open letter to Robert Caro, refuting many of the claims in Caro's biography of Moses, _The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York_ (August 26, 1974) >_Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detect__ive stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone._ - Jonathan Lethem; _Motherless Brooklyn_ (1999) In his introduction to _The Wire: Truth Be Told_ (…

SWITCH. January 27, 2020

★ 6/10

It's a difficult task to pace a noir for a modern audience, and you can feel the two and a half hour runtime. The story is interesting and the parallels to America in the present day are welcomed, but there isn't enough tonal balance to contrast all the shadowy moodiness. The plot is on the more convoluted side, and you'd imagine that with it being a story about following a trail of clues, 'Motherless Brooklyn' would reward repeat viewings - but I'm not sure I would optionally sit through all of it again. There is nothing inherently wrong with this film, bar some odd edits and framing choices, and Norton tackles the material fairly well, creating a great tribute to the noir era of filmmaking. It sometimes treads the line of parody rather than homage, but for anyone in the mood for crime mystery in the vein of 'Chinatown' or 'L.A. Confidential', this will absolutely hit the spot. - Joel …

tmdb28039023 August 26, 2022

★ 2/10

Motherless Brooklyn’s lead performance recalls two previous Ed Norton outings: Primal Fear and The Score. In the latter two, Norton plays, respectively, a cold-blooded killer posing as a stuttering altar boy, and a thief posing as a mentally-challenged janitor; in the former, he plays Lionel Essrog, a private investigator with Tourette’s syndrome. The key difference is that Lionel really does have Tourette’s and isn’t just pretending. In Primal Fear and The Score there is a performance-within-a-performance, with the character pulling a Sun Tzu and appearing weak when he’s strong in order to achieve an ulterior goal. Conversely, there is no means-to-an-end scenario in Motherless Brooklyn; the protagonist’s handicap is genuine, and while Norton does this medical condition justice like only he can, it sadly turns out to be a hindrance not only for the character, but also th…

tmdb28039023 August 30, 2022

★ 2/10

Motherless Brooklyn’s lead performance recalls two previous Ed Norton outings: Primal Fear and The Score. In the latter two, Norton plays, respectively, a cold-blooded killer posing as a stuttering altar boy, and a thief posing as a mentally-challenged janitor; in the former, he plays Lionel Essrog, a private investigator with Tourette’s syndrome. The key difference is that Lionel really does have Tourette’s and isn’t just pretending. In Primal Fear and The Score there is a performance-within-a-performance, with the character pulling a Sun Tzu and appearing weak when he’s strong in order to achieve an ulterior goal. Conversely, there is no means-to-an-end scenario in Motherless Brooklyn; the protagonist’s handicap is genuine, and while Norton does this medical condition justice like only he can, it sadly turns out to be a hindrance not only for the character, but also t…