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Motherless Brooklyn

Motherless Brooklyn: Pulling at the Thread of Power

October 31, 2019 by Steve Norton Leave a Comment

Directed and adapted for the screen by Edward Norton, Motherless Brooklyn tells the story of Lionel Essrog (Norton), a Brooklyn detective in post-war New York. Working with street smart private investigator Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), Lionel (who also goes by the name Brooklyn) and his team uncover the truth for hire. However, when Minna is shot and left for dead, Lionel determines to unravel the mystery, plunging him into a Brooklyn underworld riddled with crime, corruption and colourful characters. As his quest for truth leads him further up New York’s ladder of power, Lionel’s investigation is complicated by his Tourette syndrome, which leaves him prone to compulsive behavioural tics and inappropriate verbal outbursts.

Adapted from the 1999 novel of the same name, Brooklynis a tightly written throwback film to classic Hollywood’s noir films like The Big Sleep or Chinatown. With a stellar cast and tightly written script, Norton creates a world which feels both foreign and familiar. While the film transports the audience back to 1950s New York, it also feels current in today’s culture, highlighting racial tensions and the growing divide between the upper and lower classes. In Motherless Brooklyn, power is a drug that gives people the freedom to ‘do whatever they want, whenever they want’ but it’s also short in supply. Divided by racial and financial lines, Brooklyn is a city on the brink of chaos.Those that have little power are struggling to make their voices heard while those who have much fight ferociously to maintain it. 

As Brooklyn himself, Norton’s performance is sharp, engaging, and loving. At the same time, the character becomes a metaphor for the town for which he’s named. Plagued by Tourette Syndrome, Brooklyn feels as though there’s a chaos in his mind that bubbles over and has to be released. While the casual passerby may not immediately notice Brooklyn’s struggle, his mental chaos inevitably reveals itself. With this in mind, the film clearly draws a line between his character and the city itself, as its own unseen chaos can’t help but overflow from the underground. Diffused lighting and growing shadows point to tension between light and darkness, as Brooklyn (the character) attempts to uncover the truth about Brooklyn (the city). Like his compulsion to pull on the threads of his sweater, Brooklyn also must unravel the web of deception until the facts about his city is revealed.

Furthermore, the film also does not shy away from engaging in the complexities of Brooklyn’s mental health issues. Bullied as a child for his affliction, Brooklyn has always been the one that was pitied by others. After Minna’s death, Brooklyn becomes seen by others primarily for his mental affliction as they constantly try to ‘look out’ for him, rationalizing that he needs their protection. Frustrated by his inability to control his mind and constantly reminded of the burden he is by others, Brooklyn remains ashamed and embarrassed by his behaviour. 

Conversely, however, while clearly struggling with his mental illness, he also recognizes its value. Despite the chaos within him, his Tourettes is also what makes him a great detective by forcing him to ‘pull on the thread’ of truth and allowing him to retain incredible amounts of information. What’s more, the film even paints a portrait of Tourette syndrome with an element of beauty by highlighting the musical aspect of Brooklyn’s mental chaos. (For example, this comparison is highlighted when, in one particularly poignant scene, Brooklyn’s inadvertent vocables cause him to become a participant in a jazz ensemble.)

Featuring strong performances and well-written script, Motherless Brooklyn is an entertaining and engaging return to the noir genre. Under the Norton’s direction, the film is also impressive visually, as the shadows and darkness of New York’s underworld are constantly warring against the light of truth. 

Motherless Brooklyn unravels the mystery in theatres on November 1st, 2019.

Filed Under: Film, Film Festivals, Reviews, TIFF Tagged With: Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, film noir, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Leslie Mann, Motherless Brooklyn, TIFF, TIFF19, Willem Dafoe

Shadows of Power: 1on1 with Edward Norton (MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN)

October 29, 2019 by Steve Norton Leave a Comment

Directed by Edward Norton, Motherless Brooklyn tells the story of Lionel Essrog (Norton), a Brooklyn detective in post-war New York. Working with street smart private investigator, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), Lionel (who also goes by the name Brooklyn) and his team uncover the truth for hire. However, when Minna is shot and left for dead, Lionel determines to unravel the mystery, plunging him into a Brooklyn underworld riddled with crime, corruption and colourful characters. As his quest for truth leads him further up New York’s ladder of power, Lionel’s investigation is complicated by his Tourette syndrome, which leaves him prone to compulsive behavioural tics and inappropriate verbal outbursts. Adapted from Johnathan Letham’s book of the same name, Norton wanted to bring the story to life due due to the interesting and complex nature of its lead character.

“The character [of Lionel] was entirely the initial hook for me,” he begins. “The many things that got woven into it to sort of expand on its scope or the broader target that it had ultimately were not where I was within the beginning. I just was completely enamored with this character that Jonathan Letham created, not just because he’s a unique character with a unique condition and the idea of sending him, a person with those mental gifts and challenges, up against the idea of solving mysteries is just sort of fun. [It was also that] Jonathan’s emotional hook is brilliant. It’s exactly what we… transposed in the film.”

“You hear his inner voice from the opening page. You’re inside his head. You know him free of his condition. You know his inner mind, his inner heart and then, you see him on the outside [where] he’s kind of a hot mess of ticks and twitches and shouts [so] watching him navigate that is funny and poignant. That’s all before the end of page two. You’re rooting for him. He’s a great underdog character. You’re laughing, wincing and you [know that] wherever this guy’s going, it’s going to be fun because watching him navigate this is itself the pleasure. That was the entirety of my initial interest in it.” 

Though many of his characters over the years have appeared to struggle with a variety of conditions, Norton feels like this may be the first chance he has had to portray a man with genuine mental health issues onscreen. In order to prepare for the role, much of his research involved exploring the individualistic nature of Tourette syndrome.

“I’m trying to think if I have played characters with authentic mental health issues. I’ve played [many] characters who are faking…” laughs Norton. “So, I actually think arguably this is the first time I’ve played a character with an authentic psychological condition. It’s not a reductive , like how do you approach it? There are documentaries about people with Tourette’s. I’ve met some. You talk to people. For me, honestly, because Tourette Syndrome has many components and can be expressed in people in very individualistic ways… what I set myself out to do was find out what are a credible sort of symptomatic pieces of it and then build my own basket of them for Lionel so that you can create a weave of consistent things, like his compulsion to tap people that he feels close with or his compulsion that the idea of having a single word – in his case ‘if’ – that he says over and over… Then, [I tried to] structure that into the story…” 

However, Norton also argues that much of the importance in representing mental illness onscreen lies in refusing to allow one trait to define the character entirely.

“I don’t actually tend to think that representing physical manifestations of a thing are the hardest thing or the most important challenge,” he explains. “I think the bigger thing is not reducing any kind of disability to the whole of that person’s character. I think [that] if there’s anything people I’ve talked to say really drives them nuts, it’s when it’s made all about the disability. Obviously, in this [film], a huge part of this is Lionel’s love for Frank. It’s his sense of being motherless. It’s as much about the fact that he has never been a person who, as he says, looks past his own problems. So, I kind of concern himself with the rest of the world, you know? He’s got to grow up like anybody else… But what I think is really cool is when Laura [says], that it’s not everything. ‘Everybody’s got something,’ she says kindly. We’ve all got daily battles, right? And, it really pulls him up. Suddenly, someone’s looking at him and not seeing him just for that. They’re saying that’s just a part of life.” 

In light of this, one of the film’s more poignant scenes highlights the complicated nature of Lionel’s Tourette syndrome by comparing it with the sonic beauty of jazz music.

“I think jazz has a very Tourettic characteristic,” says Norton. “There’s the idea of looping around, playing with variations on a theme. The kind of exuberant release that is in jazz. There’s a great passage in the book about Prince’s music, but obviously we weren’t going to do that [due to the film’s period setting]. So, to me, the idea of… a scene where you see and feel for once [of] Lionel happily losing his inhibition and finding a moment of poetic liberation in it was a neat idea. I liked the idea of it that he finds an affinity with a Charlie Parker, [or] Dizzy Gillespie kind of a figure who sees him.” 

While the film’s title extends from Lionel’s nickname, it is also focuses its lens on the future and well-being of Brooklyn itself. Asked whether or not he sees any comparison between Lionel and the city, Norton believes that any comparison lies in the damage that happens when anyone (or anything) is left ‘motherless’.

“I think [the idea of the title, Motherless Brooklyn is expressed when] Laura says that, ‘We all need someone looking out for us.’ On an individual level, it’s a very lonely condition to not have anyone caring for you… Some people said to me, ‘Why are you going to… break your back trying to figure out on a budget how to effectively recreate Penn Station?’ It is kind of tilting at windmills, but it’s not nothing. The micro scale is that its lonely and sad and hard to be alone in the world and people should take care of each other. But, on the macro, it’s that, if our city is motherless, we lose Penn Station. We lose things that we’ll never get back… We lose some of the richest, most diverse communities in Brooklyn [and they] get replaced with the worst ghettos in the world, the projects. They literally [take] stable places, call them slums, rip them down and put up slums. There’s aesthetic loss. You lose the things that make a place great, like Penn Station, and to me it was like, you’ve got to see the ghost of what we lost. To make the subconscious point, these are the costs of allowing power to tell us all to get out of the way.” 

Using the shadows of its 1950s noir atmosphere, Brooklyn explore the perils of absolute power upon the average citizen. With this in mind, Norton believes that the corruptive nature of power takes root when authorities lose sight of the value of others.

According to Norton, “I think that part what creates the drive for power in some people is impatience with other human beings and a lack of authentic affection for [others]. I think we’re in an era where we’re seeing it expressed in a new resurgence of a very exclusionary idea of what America is, not only antagonistic to our actual ideals, but antagonistic to our whole history. That’s what’s so crazy about it. It’s like this romance for a thing that never existed in the first place. But it’s like what my friend (who is Mexican) said, ‘This is the Latin American hefe (or ‘dictator’) problem.’ There’s something base in us that responds to the audacity of someone [else] saying, ‘I’m going to punch through the inefficiency of us having to all work together and just get [stuff] done.’ It’s like some part of us goes, ‘yeah…’ It’s amazing that, in 2019, we’re actually still grappling with the idea that, under the right circumstances, people will elevate a bully.” 

While some might immediately assume that he is solely addressing the current presidency, Norton argues that abuses of power extend far beyond the Trump era.

“I think the thing that I was trying to look at is the idea that, in America, we’re supposed to know where the power is,” he continues. “It’s with us, right? That’s where it’s supposed to be. It’s not supposed to reside in places that we not only didn’t assign it, but we don’t realize that it has become outside of our purview… When where the power is [remains] unseen, that’s a truly dangerous situation because we’re walking around in democracy, thinking everything’s okay. We believe in the system and we don’t realize that there are forces dictating what’s really happening, that do not have our best interests in mind. That’s the most dangerous situation. To me, that’s as much about the Koch brothers as it is about Trump.” 

“The darker idea is that like there’s a mayor being inaugurated [who is] completely irrelevant and we’re about to learn that the guy who is patiently looking at his watch in the shadow of a column, whose face we haven’t seen…, is the one who calls all the shots. Whether you want to ascribe it to Citizens United or an intrinsic part of American life and capitalism that enormous amounts of power get amassed outside of the political system and to the degree that they own the political system or are evading the political system. That’s what Ralph Nader rightly said. ‘The great challenge of democracy will be whether people can retain the priority of human interest over corporate interests (he would say) … but the interest of power, basically.’” 

To hear full audio of our interview with Norton, click here.

Motherless Brooklyn uncovers the truth in theatres starting November 1st, 2019.

Filed Under: Film, Film Festivals, Interviews, TIFF Tagged With: Alec Baldwin, Bruce Willis, Chinatown, Edward Norton, film noir, Motherless Brooklyn

TIFF ’19: Motherless Brooklyn

September 14, 2019 by Steve Norton Leave a Comment

Written and directed by Edward Norton, Motherless Brooklyn tells the story of Lionel Essrog (Norton), a Brooklyn detective in post-war New York. Working with street smart private investigator Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), Lionel (who also goes by the name Brooklyn) and his team uncover the truth for hire. However, when Minna is shot and left for dead, Lionel determines to unravel the mystery, plunging him into a Brooklyn underworld riddled with crime, corruption and colourful characters. As his quest for truth leads him further up New York’s ladder of power, Lionel’s investigation is complicated by his Tourette syndrome, which leaves him prone to compulsive behavioural tics and inappropriate verbal outbursts.

Adapted from the 1999 novel of the same name, Brooklyn is a tightly written throwback film to classic Hollywood’s noir films like The Big Sleep or Chinatown. With a stellar cast and tightly written script, Norton creates a world which feels both foreign and familiar. While the film transports the audience back to 1950s New York, it also feels current in today’s culture, highlighting racial tensions and the growing divide between the upper and lower classes. Divided by racial and financial lines, Brooklyn is a city on the brink of chaos.Those that have little power are struggling to make their voices heard while those who have much fight ferociously to maintain it. 

As Brooklyn himself, Norton’s performance is sharp, engaging, and loving. At the same time, the character becomes a metaphor for the town for which he’s named. Diffused lighting and growing shadows point to tension between light and darkness, as Brooklyn (the character) attempts to uncover the truth about Brooklyn (the city). Like his compulsion to pull on the threads of his sweater, Brooklyn also must unravel the web of deception until the facts about his city is revealed.

Featuring strong performances and well-written script, Motherless Brooklyn is an entertaining and engaging return to the noir genre. Under the Norton’s direction, the film is also impressive visually, as the shadows and darkness of New York’s underworld are constantly warring against the light of truth. 

Motherless Brooklyn is currently playing at the Toronto International Film Festival. For more screenings, click here. 

Filed Under: Film, Film Festivals, Premieres, Reviews, TIFF Tagged With: Alec Baldwin, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Leslie Mann, Motherless Brooklyn, TIFF, TIFF19, Willem Dafoe

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