Spotlight
It was the fall of 1999, and everything
seemed to be lining up for Motherless
Brooklyn. Edward Norton, fresh off his
Oscar nomination for American History
X and about to stick the landing with
Fight Club, was ready to direct, produce,
and star in an adaptation of the new
mod-noir novel by Jonathan Lethem,
who had signed off on Norton’s bold
idea of shifting the contemporary
detective story to the 1950s, into a New
York City of Harlem jazz trumpeters
and Tammany Hall power brokers.
After almost 20 years of script
overhauls and shoot delays, Motherless
Brooklyn is at last a reality, with
Norton as the book’s (slightly aged) hero,
Lionel Essrog, and a cast that includes
Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Willem
Dafoe, and Alec Baldwin. Political power
meets back-alley intrigue in Essrog’s
encounters with Moses Randolph (played
by Baldwin), a stand-in for mid-century
builder-god Robert Moses. Perhaps
in part because of Baldwin’s side gig as
Donald Trump, his Randolph conjures
the current president-tycoon, a
slumlord whose racist real-estate tactics
were even uglier than his branded
midtown monuments. Norton points
to Chinatown’s response to the political
sagas of the ’70s as inspiration: “You
have probably the deepest cynicism
that had ever emerged in American
society, and that film was responsive to
that. What we’re going through now
is provoking a lot of looking at what sits
under the surface of American life.
[It’s] especially resonant when you’re
going through moments that are giving
people deep dismay.”
Though Norton had completed the
script in 2012, the 2016 election pushed it
across the finish line. “The whole thing
felt relevant again,” he said. “We all felt
that there was real value to digging in
and getting it done.” —KATEY RICH
Empire
STATE
of Mind
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