Motherless Brooklyn

Amazon Prime

Feature film

*ing: Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe

Rated: 6.5/10

It’s 1950s Brooklyn, there is jazz in the air and an amateur detective (Edward Norton) has just lost his mentor boss to some shadowy men who abduct and shoot him in an alleyway just when he arrives there to rescue him.

That’s the premise of the film which then delves into this amateur’s quest into who the killers of his boss could have been. That he suffers from the Tourette Syndrome only heightens his histrionic skills which give colour to this largely black and white vintage Brooklyn film panning over boxed taxis, steaming pit holes and, of course, those delectable hats. Norton, who plays the central character of Lionel Essrog, is as good in front of the camera as he is behind it and also with the pen. As writer-director, he does well to channelise this brainy intrigue that coasts from the underbelly of Brooklyn to its highest corridors of power, detecting deceit, drama and diehard criminals along the way, will go down well with cinema lovers of the intensely knowledgeable kinds.

After he loses his mentor (Frank Minna, played by the ever laconic Bruce Wills) to a dubious case gone wrong, he and his friends known as Minna’s men as they were rescued by him from an orphanage and trained to become detectives, go on the trail with Norton’s sharp mind skills emanating from his awkward ailment which gives him both twitches and the ability to retain a photographic memory and unfurl puzzles at the drop of a hat.

The film, adapted from Jonathan Lethem’s novel of the same name, is brilliant, nuanced, thrilling in its own special way and a treat to watch if lunatic pace of the modern kind is not really your kind of thing.