Motherless Brooklyn

The Big "If"
or
Do You Have the First Inkling of How Power Works?

Listen. This won't do any good. You'll never understand me, but I'll try once and then give it up. When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something. It makes no difference what you thought of him. He was your partner, and you're supposed to do something about it...and it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's...it's bad business to let the killer get away with it...bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere. 

Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon

"Leave it alone or you'll make a mess." Gil Coney (Ethan Suplee) keeps telling his twitchy partner Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton) while they're waiting for a stake-out. They're providing back-up for the Chief Investigator for their detective agency, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), and Lionel is starting to lose it. He keeps picking at his sweater and if he keeps doing it, it's going to unravel. He knows he shouldn't, he knows what will happen, and it's not that Lionel is dumb (which everybody thinks), it's just that he has Tourette's and unless he has a drink, or chews gum, or smokes dope, or has his mother rub his neck, he's kinda at the mercy of it. He's just a massive tic. And when he's waiting for something to go down, he's a mess. A blurting, shaking, quaking mess. Admittedly.

But, Minna trusts him. All the crew went through the war together, and it's Lionel that Minna trusts most. Because, yeah, he has Tourette's, but he's also a bit of a savant with a photographic memory. Lionel's good with details and when Minna goes over last minute instructions, he leaves with "Lionel's got it. Follow his lead." Of course, Lionel's got it; he's got it chapter and verse, and he'll be instrumental enough to listen in on the meeting, of which he knows nothing because Minna hasn't told anybody, but he will know everything by the end of it—he just won't understand why.

This being 1950's New York, Minna gives Lionel a phone booth to wait in and, once the older man's in place he calls Lionel and hides the phone in a drawer, so that Essrog can monitor the conversation in the room, and if Minna thinks something's going south, he'll make an innocuous "safe" remark for Lionel to hear in order to know where to take the next step—fight or flight.

It turns out to be a bit of both. Minna is taken by a couple of goons to another borough across one of New York's bridges—the goons in the car flash a badge and don't have to pay a toll—while Coney and Essrog struggle to keep them in sight. They catch up just in time to see the sight of Minna running to escape from his captors, but he can't outrun a bullet and he gets gunned down in an alleyway. It's a fast trip to an emergency room where Minna can only gasp out words with his last breath—"Brooklyn, she's in trouble now..."—before Essrog is escorted out...STAT.

Minna doesn't make it. And it shakes his detective agency to its core. There is a some business to take care of—tell the wife, re-arrange the org chart (if they had org charts)—but Essrog feels like they have to find out who killed Frank and to find that out, he wants to find out what he was working on. The others in the agency are all for it to a certain degree, but there's no money to be made finding out Frank's killing, so it's put on the back-burner, which means Essrog can handle it. All the other guys see Lionel as a handicap, but it was Minna who saw him as an asset.

And besides, Lionel has his hat now.

Edward Norton has wanted to make Motherless Brooklyn for a couple decades. Sure, he did. It's got a "tic-y" part, one of those ones that he excels at, even if he'd rather do something with less obvious "character." But, it's one of those detective stories that starts with a little thing, but mushrooms into the world of noir—even if so much of it is photographed in the clearest of New York daylight—where one realizes that the odds are stacked against because the fix is in and the fixers are too big and too powerful. You're lucky if you get out alive.

And where the evil is so big and so ever-present that you can only see it for the details and the anomalies. And Essrog is good at those. So, he picks at the threads of what Minna was doing, back-tracking and going forward which takes him from the highs and lows of New York, from gleaming City Hall Park to decaying Harlem and the strings that tie them together while tearing the city apart. "Leave it alone or you'll make a mess." But, Essrog can't leave it alone. He's wearing Minna's hat and his coat, and walking backwards in his footsteps, and slowly, but less than surely, he will be making them his own.

The original novel (by Jonathan Lethem) is set in contemporary times, but Norton, sets his screenplay in the 1950's and it's a good fit, taking advantage of the echoes in the detective movie boom, shadowed as it is with the era of film noir, the mainstream popularity of jazz as its soundtrack, amidst a back-drop of the post-war boom in building, an up-sweep in the economy, with the resulting gentrification and the fall-out of segregation inherent in it all. But, it's also in that valley between the increased presence of minorities in the war effort and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, where any progress their service might have engendered never materialized amid the same Jim Crow laws and racial covenants placed in the suddenly mushrooming suburbs.   

The time-shift fits the material like an old battered trench-coat and manages to keep it relevant even though relocating it to the past. It also manages to nestle comfortably in the distracted Eisenhower era, where social engineering could be accomplished over long periods of time in the name of progress where little attention would be payed to the changes, lest activists toss their wrenches into the gears.

If the movie reminds me of anything, it's the movie Chinatown, where the machinations of the powerful to manipulate society into protecting their plutocracy happens in broad daylight among the disenfranchised and the under-represented, and where subtle changes to infrastructure uproot lives and undermine neighborhoods and whole communities, turning urban planning into urban "plotting," designed to line pockets while society unravels. And that makes a mess—if not now then certainly for the future.

"The Future, Mr. "Gitts", the future!" Those are the words of Chinatown's Noah Cross (John Huston) when asked by Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) why it is that he does what he does, he being so rich and all. At least, he was thinking about the future. Motherless Brooklyn has its "big bad" just like Chinatown had its Noah Cross. It's in the character of a similarly biblically-named Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin in a part that wasn't in the book, but is based on New York developer Robert Moses). Randolph is more of a short-time thinker, having a vision of his goal but myopic about the ultimate ramifications when it comes to human beings. His eye is on the ledger, the fiscal year, and the next election cycle and what can be done to cook the books. Where Cross wants a kind of immortality from his works, Randolph wants the power to do as he pleases in some Randian plutocracy, where he sees himself as the engine, rather than by the funds provided by people who actually fund it. They pay taxes. They have no power. And so, they can be dismissed. They don't matter. 

In fact, they're pests. "They're invisible. They don't exist." Not Government of the people by the people for the people. Government despite the people. And often, to spite the people.

"Do you have the first inkling of how power works? It means you can do anything." 

My, how that line resonates these days. It should resonate all the time, but people have short memories and the powerful depend on that to survive in a perpetual shell-game, playing the public like a cat-owner with a laser-pointer. And we chase the light, never suspecting we're being manipulated from on high, given new concerns, new enemies, new priorities that are turned on and off—like a laser pointer—when it suits the powerful.

If you think Randolph is a Trump stand-in (it's Alec Baldwin, right? "Duh!"), one should consider that his character builds bridges, not walls. But bridges are just as effective.

Motherless Brooklyn is a great meal of a movie, one of the kind that come out of left-field and is just so good that you wish it wouldn't end. I haven't mentioned 3/4 of the plot because it's one of those things you don't want to spoil, and that neglects great work by Willem Dafoe, Gugu Mbatha-Rawe, and Cherry Jones (as well as stellar production design by Beth Mickle and art direction by Michael Ahern). It's nearly perfect, with its only sin being it might be a bit "on the nose" when it reaches its resolution. But, it still manages to surprise, and gives Norton another one of those flashy performances he can sink his considerable acting chops into. That is has more than that with sub-texts both in the script and the imagery shows that he's come a long way as a director since his last film, 2000's Keeping the Faith.

Hope he doesn't wait so long to make another one.