Motherless Brooklyn has flown somewhat under the radar on the months coming up to its release, which is surprising when you consider the sheer wealth of talent within it: written, directed and produced by Edward Norton (of Fight Club and Birdman fame), who stars in the titular role, it also offers strong supporting performances by Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, GuGu Mbatha Raw and Alec Baldwin, amongst a host of others.
Based on the novel of the same name by Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn tells the story of Lionel Essrog (Norton), who, after his mentor (Willis) is murdered, sets out to find what happened and set things right. At least, that’s the plot of the film, but it gets lost under the weight of everything else Norton tries to throw on top of it: a love story, a government conspiracy, housing crises, the jazz scene. At a monolithic two-and-a-half hour runtime, you’d be excused for dozing off at some point (while I struggled through the film with my eyes half open and feeling heavier than a box of concrete, I noticed other critics grabbed some shut eye around the two hour mark, which was a good call because they missed shockingly little).
The cinematography, while engaging is very clearly a visual collage of projects from Norton’s past; a lot of the skyline shots are reminiscent of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014) and the tighter shots—especially those that take place during bar brawls —bear considerable resemblance to Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999). Admittedly, the soundtrack complements the film well, but at times Thom Yorke’s warbled melancholy feels discordant to the story trying to be told.
That’s not to say that this film isn’t good: it is, but it suffers from its own extravagance. Storylines are picked up, dropped, then picked up again faster than a soap opera, and the conclusions to all are anti-climatic. This is a somewhat expected result, though, as Motherless Brooklyn has been a passion project of Norton’s for over 20 years. Because of that, he is too sympathetic to the characters– including the villain of the story (Baldwin), which places a considerable damper on any moral about tyrannous power or the mighty fist of justice that will inevitably come down on us all. No, despite the frantic energy that courses through the first two thirds of the film, it’s entirely lost in the last act, crumbling under its own weight in such spectacular fashion that it’s hard to remember it was ever there at all.
To cut a long story short; it has all the elements of Oscar bait to a gargantuan degree and still managed to let itself down. It can’t hold up the weight of all it’s trying to be without dropping the ball once or twice, and at the end, that’s all this film leaves you with: a distinct feeling that what you’ve just watched was, at worst, one big missed mark and at best a jumbled jigsaw of genres and plotlines.
Motherless Brooklyn is released in Irish cinemas from December 6.
