Episode 741 - Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

Hi everyone!

One of our goals before we close out the quarter is to review every film nominated for either a Golden Globe or an Oscar this year. Sometimes this can be tough, especially for international films that get very limited showings in the United States and even fewer streaming opportunities. Sometimes it can be tough when an underseen film gets the nomination, like today’s review for MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. We’re lucky to have Jon-David back to help us out with today’s review. For a few other reviews from Jon-David, check out MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL (Episode #713), THE CAVE (Episode #706), and RICHARD JEWELL (Episode #692). As you can see, he’s been very helpful in getting these award nominees reviewed this year!

Before the review, we’ll have a promo for Jon-David’s serial comedy crime podcast, the Mafia Hairdresser Chronicles. This campy serial podcast is based on Jon-David’s time cutting hair for a cocaine-trafficking couple in the 1980s. All the voicework is done by Jon-David, with the help of a few filters and editors. Don’t miss a single episode!

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Here we go!

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<< MAFIA HAIRDDRESSER PROMO >>

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Hello, this Jon-David aka Mafia Hairdresser, the writer and performer of the podcast The Mafia Hairdresser Chronicles, a campy crime comedy based on my time as a celebrity hairdresser in Hollywood in the 80s.

Today’s movie is MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (2019), a crime drama mystery rated-R film written, directed, and starred in by Edward Norton. Released in 2019, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYNalso stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bruce Willis, Willem Defoe, Bobby Cannavale, and Ethan Suplee.

No Spoilers.

This is the film I was really looking forward to watching, but it did not do great at the box office. I saw the trailers and the movie starred Edward Norton. The trailers looked good. And I love Edward Norton as an actor. But I had my first negative foreboding moment about this film when I saw that this film was written for screen by Edward Norton and directed by Edward Norton in the opening credits. Sometimes studios throw money at their talent because of the films the actor has agreed to be in. The studio then rewards the actors by letting them make a movie. That could be good or bad.

The story of MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN focuses on Norton’s character, Lionnel Essrog, called Freakshow because of his Tourette’s Syndrome, and he comes to the rescue of his shady detective agency boss, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who may or may not have been “detectivizing” on a case for the love of money or the love of justice. Freakshow and his detective co-workers, played by Bobby Cannavale and Ethan Suplee, end up having to take over the detective agency and they try to get to the bottom of the case Willis was working on, and which cost him everything. The time is the 50s. Brooklyn. Men wear hats. Proper women wear gloves. And Edward Norton’s character is a man with troubles.

The reason Freakshow pursues the case, which lead him and his friends into the world of corrupt politicians’ illegal use of eminent domain and profiteering by gentrification, is his love for his boss, as well as falling for the housing rights activists caught up in the middle, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Norton’s character Lionel, Freakshow, may have tics and seemingly random burst of words that actually tell each character he is in the scene with what he thinks of them, shows us how hard he has to work to get the information that he wants to solve the crimes of the politicians. But Freakshow also has a superpower, and that is that he is brilliant finding clues and leads, and he is tenacious and in love.

What really didn’t work for me in this film was that each character that Freakshow has a scene with, whether it be Alec Balwin who plays Moses Randolph, the evil city planner architect whom all the murder and crime clues lead to, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Laura Rose, whom he tries to protect and falls in love with, is that the scenes just don’t have passion. I didn’t ever feel that Baldwin’s character was a great villain, and I never saw the chemistry between the leading man and the damsel in distress in any of their scenes together.

In this film, no one is really who they appear to be when introduced in the story. Willem Defoe plays Paul, a troubled and mentally unstable man connected to Moses and Laura, and he seems to have all the answers. In fact, in almost every scene, he pretty much tells Freakshow everything he needs to know to find the next clue. If this were a book, it might be interesting, but in this film, it is just lazy, obvious, expository dialogue. Leslie Mann, one of my favorite actresses shows up, in a small part in this film, against type, and she plays the wife to Bruce Willis’ Morton, and I loved every scene she was in.

I liked this story. And nothing was too technically wrong with this film, and yet I didn’t feel the art direction, the writing, the directing, nor the editing in this film matched the expectations a big budget popular book adaptation it should have had. MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN had the obligatory scenes of Norton’s character getting roughed up in an alley (but why they thugs didn’t kill him in the scene was beyond me), and it had the cool older model cars and fedoras and even the jazz night club scenes. But there was no lift off, or big twists that shocked me. No scene where I thought, ‘Wow, that was a great performance!’ And I could have done without the narration because the movie never really felt like a classic noir or gangster or gumshoe movie. I just feel that Edward Norton didn’t have a team of tried and true auteurs to hash out and work on the details in this film before they locked in scenes and story.

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN aspires to be Chinatown but just didn’t do it for me.

Rotten Tomatoes: 63%

Metacritic: 60

One Movie Punch: 5.5/10

You can now stream this film on Amazon, YouTube, GooglePlay, and Vudu.