Jazzy Noir Motherless Brooklyn
Karin McKie, MFA
Chicago Freelance Content Writer | Feature Articles in Education, Building Trades, Culture, PR, Marketing + more | Building Safety Journal, Daily Beast, AAM + more | [email protected]
Edward Norton snapped up the movie rights to Jonathan Lethem's novel "Motherless Brooklyn" before it was even published in 1999, and has been working to produce the film ever since.
As adapter, the director and star took the modern story and set the screenplay in late 1950s New York as a noir crime drama. The flavor fits, as Norton plays private detective savant Lionel Essrog, tailing and tussling with Tammany Hall toughs. When his boss and friend Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) gets hit, Essrog takes to the streets to investigate racist politicians like Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), a Fred Trump-like developer who decimates neighborhoods, and his brother Paul (Willem Dafoe), as well as community activists like Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones) and Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).
Essrog struggles with Tourette's Syndrome, the "anarchist in his brain," barking out his id dialogue while trying to be an undercover gumshoe, also fighting his obsessive-compulsive disorder. He says, "It's like a piece of my head broke off and got a life of its own, then just decided to keep joy-riding me for kicks." The character's nickname is Freak Show.
It's a lot to process, but Norton seems to have moved seamlessly from his fraught character to being a thoughtful director, as his appreciative cast notes in the one Blu-ray extra, "Edward Norton's Methodical Process." The actors needed to be fluid, the opposite of "method," to be "stagecraft professionals" in order to roll with the punches of Norton rapidly in and out of scenes. Norton is equally complimentary of his seasoned scene partners.
Norton also talks about how his love letter to New York also embraces the jazz ethos, and how he worked with Wynton Marsalis to play all the music featured in the smoky club scenes, and with Radiohead's Thom Yorke to come up with his character's internal theme song. The behind-the-scenes featurette characterizes the jazz as another character, as are the parts of the city which have already disappeared, like Penn Station, resurrected here.
Motherless Brooklyn
Blu-ray
$19.96
https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/motherless-brooklyn
https://www.edgemedianetwork.com/entertainment/movies//286308/motherless_brooklyn