This plot, very- Chinatown, involves a crooked power-hungry urban-planning puppetmaster named Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin) who has a plan to annihilate minority community spaces in New York City.

So why make the movie noir, then? Well, the other thing you’ve probably heard about Motherless Brooklyn the movie is that it features an entirely new plot (in addition to hitting the novel’s key moments, which means the film topples at two and a half hours long).

And “When I heard ‘Alfred Hitchcock,’” explains Lionel in the book, of his ‘Tourette’s brain,’ “I silently replied ‘Altered Houseclock’ or ‘Ilford Hotchkiss.’” The point of the novel Motherless Brooklyn is that it’s not noir-it just holds on to some of its syllables. Lionel knows who Philip Marlowe is he quotes from him randomly when he thinks about how he, too, is a detective. With all its chiaroscuro and detectivey melancholy, Motherless Brooklyn the movie might as well be the content that the novel has already taken in and chomped into vernacular. Motherless Brooklyn the novel is a referential, thoroughly interior affair-rather like its protagonist, Lionel Essrog, a thoughtful PI henchman with Tourette’s Syndrome, it has digested decades of communicative broadcasting and is constantly processing them, spitting them out when the timing feels right. Norton, who spent nearly twenty years adapting Jonathan Lethem’s classic book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction when it was released in 1999, has turned it into a perennial noir story: a narrative that might as well be from the end of the era of literary Modernism, rather than distantly aflame with postmodernism.

The first thing you’ll notice about Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn adaptation is probably the thing you’ve heard the most about it so far: that it’s set forty years earlier than the novel from which it takes its name, in the mid-50s rather than the mid-90s.

Book review motherless brooklyn