Motherless Brooklyn, writer-director-star Edward Norton’s adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, is confident enough in its own scope to begin with Shakespeare, and it certainly backs up this confidence with an argument. A quotation from Measure for Measure invites us to reflect on the nature of power: “O! It is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”
Then we’re bang into New York City 1957, with private detective Frank Minna (Bruce Willis in a subtle performance as a generous man with a hard edge, or a hard man with a generous one) meeting some shady characters in a shadier room. Norton plays Lionel Essrog, one of Minna’s proteges, part of a crew who fought in the war, now running medium-level investigations under the wire. Lionel has Tourette syndrome, producing frequent verbal and physical tics; some people respond rudely — he gets called “Freakshow” by some so-called friends; some are respectful and compassionate; some don’t care about his Tourette’s, because they don’t care about him at all.
The first few minutes of Motherless Brooklyn provide one of the more enticing car chases in recent cinema, culminating in a genuinely shocking death. Like the whole movie, it’s brilliantly edited (to a fantastic score by Daniel Pemberton) — the drama and the pathos cutting into each other, sometimes flowing, sometimes crashing, as I imagine the experience of Tourette’s might be. A friend with Tourette’s tells me that the book is the most resonant depiction of the syndrome that he’s encountered; he’s more ambivalent about the film, respecting its sincere attempt, but critiquing the loss of nuance, such as its conception of Lionel as being granted special powers of memorization. He was moved, however, by the scene where Lionel, bereft, seeks the solace of his cat, but the cat is frightened off by an involuntary tic. But the audience at his screening laughed at this scene, deepening the frustration of Tourette’s being so regularly portrayed as the “funny” condition to the point that the accurate depiction of a painful moment is so readily interpreted as a throwaway joke.
