In short: Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

New York in the 1950s. Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), the mentor of Tourette’s Syndrome suffering detective Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton) is murdered while trying to blackmail someone with quite a bit of clout for money.

Lionel, as brilliant as he is strange, does his best to find the killer, and stumbles into a maze of complicated relations (between people and between communities), conspiracies, lies, dangerous truths and dark secrets of the past.

Edward Norton’s very free adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel has suffered quite the critical drubbing. On one hand, I do understand: visually and stylistically, Norton’s not much of a director, tending to the most conservative and often bland approach of framing any given scene with pacing to match; on the script level, he makes the decision to transfer a very highly regarded (and pretty damn brilliant) book into a historical past none of the original’s plot was actually about. Norton clearly prefers things slow and there’s a labyrinthine quality to his approach to the mystery genre that’ll get into quite a few people’s craw.

For me, this labyrinthine quality is rather one of the film’s strengths, an approach perfectly fitting to the traditional noir private detective in the Chandler tradition (and Essrog as a character fits that tradition wonderfully, too), the film’s way of portraying truth as it plays out in real life between actual people as something that’s much more complex than truth as a philosophical abstraction. I’m also very happy with the movie as a left-wing critique of elements of US culture. Because the reason for Norton’s shifting of the film’s setting back into the 50s is so he can do something like Chinatown for New York, though a Chinatown that’s not nihilist and pessimistic to its core but hopeful to a fault. But, as I’m growing older, I’ve found myself being pretty okay with films that do at least dare to dream that injustices might be made just and the people doing that deserve a happily ever after (or at least until the credits run).

Norton’s script may have its eccentricities, but I found myself drawn into the world it creates and the character that populate this world, going through those moments that don’t quite seem to make sense as anything but noir pastiche the same way you go through a Chandler plot, accepting the messiness because whodunnit really never was the point of the endeavour at all. The pacing, it turns out, isn’t actually as slow as it seems once you get into that spirit, either, rather the proper way to talk about a world and the relations of people in that world.

On the acting side, this is simple great stuff, Norton overacting with great intelligence (and a bit of vanity, to be sure), Gugu Mbatha-Raw adding another impressive outing to a career that seems to become rather full of impressive work in interesting films, Alec Baldwin doing a note perfect horrible “Great Man”, and the rest of the gang acting in style.