Edward Norton (2019)
I didn’t stay for long. This is little more than a note that I bought a ticket to see the film and the circumstances in which I did. It was with escapism firmly in mind. I booked for the afternoon of Friday the thirteenth, by which time the General Election result would be known but hard to avoid if you switched on your phone or television. I hadn’t, unusually, stayed up all night to watch the results – masochism has its limits – but I still didn’t get much sleep. By the time I’d walked down to the Richmond Odeon fleapit in Red Lion Street, I wasn’t feeling too good and I couldn’t concentrate on Motherless Brooklyn. It runs 144 minutes and I gave up before halfway.
I might have persevered for longer if Edward Norton’s second feature as a director (and his first in nearly two decades) had been more engaging. Norton also wrote the screenplay and stars in Motherless Brooklyn, adapted from Jonathan Lethem’s novel of the same name. The book was published in 1999 with a contemporary New York setting. The film moves the action back to the second half of the 1950s. (In case you’re in any doubt, there’s a long-held shot of a Broadway theatre where Look Back in Anger, with Mary Ure and Kenneth Haigh, is playing.) Norton is Lionel Essrog, who works at a detective agency. As youngsters, he and his fellow tecs were all rescued from an abusive orphanage by the agency boss Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), whose murder triggers the main plot.
Nicknamed ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ by Frank, Lionel has a photographic memory and Tourette syndrome. The latter, as tends to happen with such afflictions on screen, comes and goes as required – to liven things up occasionally but not get in the way when Lionel has something important to say. Norton shouts and twitches impressively. As one of Lionel’s colleagues, Bobby Cannavale does a good turn too. But a turn is what it comes over as, and the same goes, in what I saw, for Norton’s performance. (His cast also includes Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe, Cherry Jones and Gugu Mbatha-Raw.) Daniel Pemberton’s music is moody and atmospheric but the film seems no more than neo-noir pastiche.
Anyway, it was far too flimsy to take my mind off the reality of living in Johnson’s Britain – and the prospect of this lasting for many years. I can’t bring myself to use his forename, which many people seem to do as a term of endearment – or as if he still needn’t be taken seriously. It’s frustrating: at least Trump can mean fart, so that when you say his name you refer to a quasi-excretory function. Although the first and last letters sound promising, B—s offers no such relief. As the man himself has said, you can’t polish a turd. Perhaps the solution is to be on first-name terms in the spirit in which Dennis Potter called his terminal cancer Rupert, for Murdoch.
13 December 2019
