When Minna gets murdered for reasons unknown, Lionel and the other surviving 'Minna Boys' at the agency are left to pick through the mystery, but only he has the dedication and the mental discipline to splash around in increasingly murky waters.

In 1957 New York, Lionel works under private detective Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who's brought him under his wing despite his annoying outbursts and cognitive hiccups. Like many detective stories of its kind, Motherless Brooklyn starts with a small crime that metastasizes into a much larger, more insidious civic cancer. Movie Interviews Edward Norton, Hard Again As 'Stone' He's more like a novelty player in a mediocre municipal noir that's a copy of a copy of Chinatown, like an East Coast cover of L.A. As an actor, Norton makes a five-course meal out of Lionel's affliction - which, frankly, resembles Dustin Hoffman's autist in Rain Man too closely - but all his considerable passion and wit cannot blanket the film in the character's voice like it does in the novel.

The unique experience of reading Motherless Brooklyn is staying inside Lionel's head, confined to its tics and loops while also witness to the odd rigors that make him such an excellent detective. For all the questions raised about Norton's decision to turn back the clock and set the action in the 1950s - a decision that actually pays dividends to some extent - he can't solve the most common problem with any adaptation: The internal cannot be made external. His tenacity in seeing the project through to the end is extraordinary, but the years haven't diminished the fundamental challenges to bringing Lethem's book to the screen. Motherless Brooklyn, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw (left) and Edward Norton (right), follows a detective who get caught up investigating corruption in New York City.įor the 20 years since he read an advance copy of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn, Edward Norton has labored to direct an adaptation and cast himself in the lead role of Lionel Essrog, a private detective with Tourette syndrome.

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