After reportedly stewing on the back-burner for nearly two decades, Edward Norton’s “Motherless Brooklyn” has finally become a reality. Based on Jonathan Lethem’s novel of the same name, Norton (“Keeping the Faith,” “American History X,” “Fight Club”) wrote and directed this noir mystery set in 1950s New York City, and we now have our first trailer courtesy of Warner Bros.
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“Motherless Brooklyn” centers on Lionel Essrog, played by Norton himself, an isolated, obsessive-compulsive detective who takes aim at solving the murder of his mentor Frank Minna, played by Bruce Willis (“Die Hard,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Sixth Sense”). Along the way, Lionel seemingly strikes up a companionship with Laura Rose, an exclusively new character who is given life by Gugu Mbatha-Raw (“Belle,” “A Wrinkle in Time,” “Fast Color”).
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Here’s the official synopsis:
Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton), a lonely private detective living with Tourette Syndrome, ventures to solve the murder of his mentor and only friend, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis). Armed only with a few clues and the engine of his obsessive mind, Lionel unravels closely-guarded secrets that hold the fate of New York in the balance. In a mystery that carries him from gin-soaked jazz clubs in Harlem to the hard-edged slums of Brooklyn and, finally, into the gilded halls of New York’s power brokers, Lionel contends with thugs, corruption and the most dangerous man in the city to honor his friend and save the woman who might be his own salvation.
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Edward Norton directed, wrote, produced and stars in “Motherless Brooklyn.” The film’s journey to the screen began in 1999 when Norton saw the cinematic potential in Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn and its unforgettable central character. But from the beginning, Norton aimed to transpose Lethem’s contemporary characters into a different period and plot and give it a distinctive atmosphere by re-setting the drama in the 1950s—a time of great change in New York City.
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Although Lethem’s novel was set in the ’90s, Norton decided to transpose the story to the ’50s, which allowed him to play with the smoky and mysterious sensibilities of the period. Norton recently explained his interest in 1950s New York City to Vanity Fair, describing “all of its kind of institutional racism and the devastation of the old city from neighborhoods right up to Penn Station, perpetrated at the hands of an autocratic, almost imperial force, who was intensely antagonistic to everything we think defines American democratic principle. That’s not a history most people are actually familiar with.”
Alongside Norton, Willis, and Mbatha-Raw, “Motherless Brooklyn” also stars Alec Baldwin (“It’s Complicated,” “Glengarry Glen Ross”), Willem Dafoe (“At Eternity’s Gate,” “The Florida Project”), and Leslie Mann (“Knocked Up,” “The Bling Ring”).
“Motherless Brooklyn” will hit theaters on November 1st, after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, showing up at Telluride most likely before then, and appearing as the closing night film of the New York Film Festival.
