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THE ENVELOPE LOS ANGELES TIMES THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2019
J
onathan Lethem’s
offbeat detective novel
“Motherless Brooklyn”
had barely hit book-
shelves in 1999 when ac-
tor Edward Norton per-
suaded New Line Cine-
ma to purchase the movie
rights. Twenty years lat-
er, Norton’s film adaptation has finally
emerged as a finished product — a sweep-
ing, ambitious crime epic that doubles as a
secret history of midcentury New York City.
Norton didn’t always know he needed to
direct the film. But from the moment he dis-
covered protagonist Lionel Essrog, a sensi-
tive gumshoe with Tourette syndrome and a
photographic memory, he knew he had to
play him.“The greedy actor impulse definitely
came first,” Norton says. “The character is
such a rich mess of paradoxes. He’s afflicted
but talented, he’s funny but also poignant
and lonely, he’s underestimated but he’s also
a hard-boiled, street-hardened orphan.”
While starring in such films as 1999’s
“Fight Club” and 2002’s “25th Hour,” which
cemented his reputation as Hollywood’s
most talented and versatile young actor,
Norton kept thinking about what to do with
Lethem’s novel, which is set in an ambigu-
ous contemporary moment but whose char-
acters speak in a kind of 1950s slang.
“In 2003, I sort of took a year off,” Norton
says. “I started meditating on ‘Motherless
Brooklyn,’ and in that period I was also go-
ing deep on New York history. I would wake
up with these kind of odd ideas, and would
call Jonathan [Lethem] and say, ‘I know this
would be somewhat bold or radical in the
realm of adaptation, but ... your characters,
they feel like guys out of the ’50s. What do
you think about just going fully back?”
Norton expanded his idea of the narra-
tive to include an invented political opera-
tive who resembles New York’s midcentury
power broker Robert Moses. (He’s played by
Alec Baldwin in the film.) What started as a
minimalist crime yarn turned into a histori-
cal epic, with the novel’s local murder mys-
tery opening up into a chronicle of large-scale racial and economic injustice.
“I started really working on the notion —
could we do the story of the hidden crimes
of New York the way ‘Chinatown’ tells you
the secret story of L.A.? Could we deal with
something bigger? And [Lethem] was like:
‘Just run with it.’ ”
Norton doesn’t expect the novel’s fans to
take umbrage, because the core of the story’s
appeal is left intact.
“Nobody’s rela-
tionship with that
book is a plot-driv-
en relationship,” he
says. “It’s com-
pletely an emo-
tional relationship
with Lionel. I abso-
lutely anchored the
film on the brilliant
emotional trick
that Jonathan cre-
ated, which is that
you’re inside Lio-
nel’s head but out-
side his affliction.”
Though Norton had only a single film
under his belt as a director — the charming
but low-key 2000 romantic comedy “Keep-
ing the Faith” — he decided to take the reins
on “Motherless Brooklyn.” He says that his
friend (and Warner Bros. chairman) Toby
Emmerich told him: “ ‘You should just do it.
It’ll be better for you to manage the process.
The editing of that role will be part of per-
forming it.’
“And he was right about that, because I
felt much freer to experiment as an actor
knowing that I am giving myself clay to
sculpt later.”
To make his job easier, he hired a dream
team of theater veterans, including Gugu
Mbatha-Raw, Cherry Jones, Willem Dafoe,
Bobby Cannavale and Michael K. Williams.
Norton says the cast is “close to my equiva-
lent of the Mercury Theatre repertory. I
wanted them to have theater chops, so that I
knew they would show up and deliver and
not have to rely on a lot of trickery around
the cut.”
More important, he says, “It’s [mostly]
New York actors I’ve worked with since lit-
erally I was 24 years old. I didn’t want any-
body who wasn’t from here. I think there’s
people playing New York dress-up and peo-
ple who just have the real cellular, adult, ma-
ture understanding of it.”
In the end, “Motherless Brooklyn” has
helped Norton develop a fluent understand-
ing of the power structures that shaped his
home city. “This city is so impossibly rich
with hidden stories. But there’s been a lot of
damage done in the push to constantly
evolve this place.”
Some of it was in his bones — he de-
scribes his grandfather, urban developer
James Rouse, as “sort of the anti-Robert Mo-
ses” — but much of it was the product of his
own detective work.
“I think I could’ve acted the part 20 years
ago, but I couldn’t have directed it,” Norton
says. “I didn’t yet totally understand what I
wanted it to be about.”Michael NagleFor The TimesTHE CONTENDERS‘Brooklyn’
in the ’50s
Edward Nortonturns
Jonathan Lethem’s novel
‘Motherless Brooklyn’ into a
‘Chinatown’-esque saga of
New York’s hidden stories.
BY AKIVA GOTTLIEB
This
city is so
impossiblyrich with
hiddenstories.
EDWARDNORTON
on New York City