Post Chandler classical noir revisited, with a protagonist with an obsessive-compulsive syndrome that makes him look like a Dustin Hoffman character of the 60s. There is indeed a 60s feeling, of ideological revisitation, mixed with the code of hard-boiled movies. Best noir of the year, recalling almost instantly The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon or Chinatown.
Norton plays Lionel Essrog, the detective with a tic that means he will convulsively yelp disjointed phrases, and jerk his head and grimace as if suddenly suppressing a huge yawn; Norton fabricates these mannerisms with care. But Lionel is also blessed with a superb memory and is good at his job. When his boss, friend and mentor Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) is killed shadowing some scary individuals, his fellow private dicks Tony (Bobby Cannavale), Gilbert (Ethan Suplee) and Danny (Dallas Roberts) are shocked but resigned; Lionel is, however, convinced Frank was on the verge of blowing open a corrupt city hall conspiracy, involving the ethnic cleansing of black people from areas ripe for lucrative redevelopment. Obsessive-compulsive Lionel believes he can piece together the clues to this mystery, involving a ruthless politician (Alec Baldwin), a local malcontent (Willem Dafoe) and a smart community activist (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).
As it is, the biggest ego in Motherless Brooklyn is a man named Moses Randolph. He’s loosely based on Robert Moses, the notorious “master builder’ of mid-century New York whose creation of the suburbs amounted to a form of social cleansing. But the fact that Moses is played by a bullish Alec Baldwin, who impersonates Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live, suggests a more obvious contemporary parallel. Norton insists that this was largely unintentional. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/29/edward-norton-and-thom-yorke-the-last-thing-we-wanted-was-for-it-to-get-bloody
And so the long odyssey through the big gaunt city begins, a city depicted in sombre dark greys and browns; an odyssey punctuated by Lionel and his colleagues getting nasty beatings from goons and being carried back to the office covered in bruises and blood… and all this is partly because Norton has taken the decision to change the late 1990s setting of the original novel and backdate it to the 1950s. There are plenty of beautiful, classic automobiles, cleaned and polished to a showroom gleam as such cars tend to be in the movies, and not dirty and scuffed-up the way they would be in real life. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/12/motherless-brooklyn-film-review-edward-norton