Review: "Motherless Brooklyn" (2019)

Private corruption leads to public corruption -- the personal venality of those in power is inflicted upon the masses in terrible ways. We are seeing this in extremis with the morally rotten and massively corrupt presidency of Donald Trump. Although this reality horror show will end a week from today, its stench will linger over us for a long time afterwards.

And that's the overarching problem -- even when bad powerful men go away, we the people remain stuck with their corrupt works for years and decades to come.

If you've ever read The Power Broker, Robert Caro's biography of NYC "master builder" Robert Moses, or seen the movie Chinatown, a fictional retelling of engineer William Mulholland bringing water to Los Angeles, the central concept within both is that the personal corruption of these powerful men fueled and warped the development of our nation's two biggest cities -- and, even now, decades after their deaths, we are literally living in the crime scenes i.e. the cities they made. 

And that's the basic idea behind Edward Norton's 2019 movie Motherless Brooklyn: the city is a crime.

A very liberal adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn is Norton's attempt to take the basic framework of Chinatown (a private detective investigating a weird crime) and marry it with the facts in The Power Broker (an unelected master planner who builds in NYC with dictatorial power) to make a 21st-century fable about the corrupt shaping of our city. 

A thumbnail of the plot: a private detective with Tourette's syndrome named Lionel Essrog investigates the murder of one his partners. His investigation leads him to Harlem where he meets a woman named Laura Rose who works with someone named Gabby Horowitz (based on Jane Jacobs) who is fighting the redevelopment plans of city commisioner Moses Randolph (based on you-know-who). Essrog eventually meets up with a man named Paul, another brilliant but failed city planner, who turns out to be Randolph's brother and who knows a dark secret that could bring him down. Essrog discovers that Randolph's redevelopment plan is just a scam to kick poor black people out of their homes and sell their property to private developers. Paul explains to Essrog how Randolph's power is beyond anyone else's in government and how, as the head of an unelected public authority, he is totally unaccountable to anyone. Events ensue and Essrog comes to realize that Laura's life is in danger -- unless he can somehow get to Randolph and blackmail him with his secret. There's lots of double-crossing and complexity that makes this a very noirish yarn. 

It's a story about the power behind the power, the secret history of NYC, and the darkness behind it all. Also, it's a tale about the basic evils of gentrification and how the "public good" is often a cover for private greed.

The cast is excellent: Norton is compelling as Essrog, Alec Baldwin is ominous as Randolph, and Willem Dafoe is the standout as the tortured Paul. The cast includes Michael K. Wiliams, Bobby Cannavale, a cameo by Bruce Willis, Cherry Jones as Gabby, and a very good actress named Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Laura. 

Norton is a fine director and the movie holds your attention to a point but, ultimately, the story feels slight in relation to the heights of its ambition. You can tell, in a way, that Norton is suffering from the classic "anxiety of influence" -- he is cleary in awe of, and has great reverence for, Chinatown and The Power Broker and the original novel, that his efforts with this film feel stunted, as much as influenced, by them. Also, I think there's an inherit problem when you're trying to make a movie that's partly inspired by a novel but also trying to incorporate plot lines and factoids from another movie and another book. It's just too much -- and while a noble attempt it makes the story and its themes feel more jumbled than inspired.

Still, it's an interesting concept for a movie -- and it's more of a concept than a movie in my opinion -- but that's why I recommend people see Motherless Brooklyn along with enjoying it's wonderful cast.