Motherless Brooklyn

Writer / Director / Star Edward Norton's hommage to Hollywood gumshoe features, Motherless Brooklyn, has so many stellar elements to it -- the cast, the period detail, the story, the music -- that I wish it were a better movie. Norton's heart is in the right place in putting this tale of big city corruption and racism in the New York boroughs based on the novel by Jonathan Lethem on the screen in Trump's America. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to. Maybe the narrative reminded me too much of Chinatown (1974). Maybe Norton's character's Tourette tick didn't seem to add as much to the character or the story as his obsessive compulsiveness. Maybe it was the draggy pacing and some seemingly interminable passages that a more seasoned director would have sensed were extraneous and repetitive. Maybe it was the unevenness in dialogue that seemed to borrow both from gangland flicks of the Cagney era and the streetwise banter of a more recent age, with some pretty jarring moments of "they wouldn't have said that in 1950s New York." The picture still entertains; it's just not the keeper I really hoped it would be.