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Review: Norton crafts a ‘Chinatown’-ish tale in ‘Motherless Brooklyn’

Jonathan Lethem’s novel about a private eye with Tourette’s syndrome, “Motherless Brooklyn,” starts with a brilliant burst of uncontrolled profanity and an explanation of its protagonist’s condition.

“Words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They’re an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm.”

Lethem lets loose a riot of language across the subsequent pages, remaking a classic detective story with an uncontrollable flow of words. In his intelligent, engrossing and derivative adaptation of “Motherless Brooklyn,” Edward Norton has something tidier in mind.

Norton, who wrote, directed, produced and stars in the film, has shifted the story from the ’90s to the ’50s, taking a then-contemporary twist on an old genre and sending it back to its late-noir heyday, along with all the period-appropriate trench coats, automobiles and venetian blinds. Norton first sought out the book more than 20 years ago — this is a longtime “passion project” finally come to fruition — and it’s clear that he wanted to enlarge the story’s ambitions. He’s after a “Chinatown” for New York.

Lionel Essrog (Norton) is private dick whose mentor Frank Minna (Bruce Willis, whose infrequent appearance in movies of late has only heightened his powerful presence), adopted Lionel and raised him in his private investigator business. When Minna is killed in the film’s opening scenes, Essrog throws himself into discovering the murderers, whipping up his fellow detectives — Tony (Bobby Cannavale), Gilbert (Ethan Suplee) and Danny (Dallas Roberts) — to join in the search.

Essrog, at times donning the guise of a reporter, follows a trail of clues that leads him across the metropolis and into a broad city hall conspiracy that rises to the penthouse-heights of New York power. Along the way are trips through a not-yet-razed Penn Station, a handsome Washington Square Park and a pivotal Harlem jazz club (where Michael K. Williams plays a trumpet player). He befriends a black attorney, Laura Ross (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who helps him realize the full scope of the corruption revolving around “slum clearance” policies of redevelopment, and how Minna figures into it.

Norton is leading Essrog into foundational midcentury New York history. Just as Jake Gittes unwittingly uncovered the water supply sins on which Los Angeles was built in “Chinatown,” “Motherless Brooklyn” winds its way through the neighborhood-destroying freeway laying of Robert Moses’ New York. “Motherless Brooklyn” is more indebted, ultimately, to Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” than Lethem’s novel.

The Robert Moses doppelganger here is named Moses Randolph and played with perfection by Alec Baldwin, who’s making something of a habit of playing New York’s real-estate villains. In one fine moment with a large map of New York behind him, he insists that he’s not above the law, “I’m ahead of it.”