Post by PhantomKnight on Nov 15, 2019 12:04:22 GMT -5
On paper, Motherless Brooklyn looks like an intriguing package. A 50's-set detective noir about a PI investigating his mentor's murder, who uncovers corruption in the city's government almost up to the highest levels. Oh, and he has Tourrette's Syndrome. This is a movie that aspires to be like Chinatown, but Chinatown it ain't.
This isn't so much an awful movie as it is an aggressively mediocre one. It's directed, adapted for the screen and produced by Edward Norton, who's also the lead actor of the thing, and it definitely feels like a miscalculated vanity project more than it does a well-crafted film. Credit where credit's due, Norton directs this pretty competently and he gets solid performances out of his cast of seasoned actors, plus he himself is quite good here. But everything else feels problematic. One of the biggest issues here is the pacing. This movie is almost 2 1/2 hours (already too long as it is), but it feels like 4 1/2. Norton's script continuously focuses on these rather dull subplots and side stories that don't have that much going for them and just ruin the pacing and any sense of immediacy the main mystery has. There's nothing inherently wrong with having a big cast of characters, but you've got to make them all interesting in some way, and that's not the case here. Most just feel like your typical stock characters you'd find in a story like this, and quite a few of them disappear for large stretches of time because the film tries juggling so many. But concerning the film's mystery...it's honestly kind of a snoozefest. And also a little murky in the way it's ultimately explained. It ultimately comes down to the kind of secret dealings we're used to seeing in stories like this, and offers no real interesting new spin on it. By the time the film reveals the big picture, it's just such a shrug-worthy "That's it?" kind of thing. It ultimately just further drives home the question of why did this movie need to be 2 1/2 hours?
Something else, though: Norton's character has Tourrette's. Okay, it's an original character trait we haven't seen before with someone like this. However, it only gets in the way more often than it doesn't. Which is to say, all the time. It constantly interferes with tone and pulls you out of scenes. Also -- in true noir fashion, there's narration from the main character throughout. But, why is the narration tic-less? I mean, I get why, but still, it stands out.
Motherless Brooklyn is a hard movie to really justify seeing. Maybe if your bored one night or afternoon and it's streaming somewhere, but even then, it'll probably just bore you further. If it had been given to a more capable director who could've honed it down to something more interesting, then there might be something here. But as it stands, Motherless Brooklyn is a misfired vanity project destined to quickly be forgotten, probably by the end of the calendar year.
**/****
