Motherless Brooklyn movie review (2019)

The end product is another modern noir in the vein of “Chinatown,” “The Two Jakes,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Mulholland Falls,” and so many period TV dramas focusing on tough guys in hats, where the investigation of a seemingly straightforward crime leads the stalwart hero up the social ladder until he finally confronts the person responsible for every other character’s misfortune, an embodiment of wealth, power and venality so connected that he probably can’t be taken down, only bruised a bit. (Lionel’s guide and ward is Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Laurie Rose, a political activist helping African-Americans resist displacement; they turn out to have more in common than they initially thought, and Norton resists the urge to turn the character into a combination love interest and information delivery device, letting Mbatha-Raw create a real person with a believable connection to her community.)

The second most surprising thing about “Motherless Brooklyn” is what a crowd-pleaser it is, despite its determination to be both a stylish period detective story and a tutorial on how institutionalized racism, civic corruption, and gentrification are braided together in American life. The storytelling leans too hard on verbal exposition, particularly during the second half, but it’s remarkable how cleanly the film lays out its conspiracy and defines every character in its large cast, from Minna’s wife Julia (Leslie Mann) to Norton’s colleagues and former orphanage-mates (Dallas Roberts, Ethan Suplee and Bobby Cannavale, 100% credible as a sleazy alpha) to Laurie’s supervisor, neighborhood activist Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones), to the inhabitants of Brooklyn’s working class and poor Black community (standouts include a Miles Davis-like trumpeter played by Michael K. Williams, and a club owner and World War II combat veteran played by Robert Wisdom). There’s also a brutal henchman (Radu Spinghel) so gigantic that Norton might as well have pulled a “Police Squad!” and cut the top of his head off at the frame line.

Norton, his editor Joe Klotz, and the movie’s diverse and skilled cast inject lots of humor and clever bits of character business into the story. Even the darkest or most upsetting scenes are leavened with the sort of deadpan wit that we used to associate with old detective and film noir pictures—the kind where characters entered rooms preceded by their own shadows, had a cutting remark for every situation, and carried lighters even if they didn’t smoke. 

You get to the point where you expect the characters to do things they always do, even when it might jeopardize the success of whatever mission they’re on: character-based suspense, rooted in personality. Will Lionel blurt something out during an interview with a witness that will ruin his shaky cover story? Will Laurie’s zeal for justice jeopardize Gabby’s activist campaign, which has to be cognizant of racial resentment by the whites who run the city? Will Randolph’s desire to immediately break and humiliate any public officials who stand in his way torpedo his plan to remake New York? These are the kinds of questions that settled in moviegoers’ minds more often during earlier eras, when films like “Motherless Brooklyn”—genre exercises about realistic characters doing things that could actually happen—were a more common sight on big screens.

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