He traces it to a plot involving a land dealer in 1950s New York City. Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn is about Lionel investigating the death of Frank at the hand of some government goons. So much of the film’s heart is in the right place. But now it is against the backdrop of the 1950s for real, losing the out-of-time aspect of the book’s characters and instead places it into an entirely new reality. Lionel is still a detective with Tourette’s Syndrome, and Frank still dies.
But in adapting Motherless Brooklyn in 2019, Edward Norton decides to completely change when and where and how the events of the novel play out.
The novel operates as light satire, taking on tropes of the 1950s and hard-boiled detective fiction in a direction that points to why these stories don’t exist anymore. Lionel deals with the death of Frank Minna, the lead investigator at the agency where he worked.
Written and set in 1999, the Jonathan Lethem novel involves a Tourette’s-afflicted detective named Lionel Essrog. The history of Motherless Brooklyn from the page to the screen is difficult to understand. The closing night film at New York Film Festival, “Motherless Brooklyn” is an exercise in self-indulgence from Edward Norton, a hodge-podge of ideas without any real cohesion.
