Motherless Brooklyn (opens Friday Nov 1)
My friend won advance screening tickets tonight for Motherless Brooklyn, which turned out to be a rather deluxe affair with wine and food served beforehand in the "VIP" cinema area of a cinema in Vancouver, Canada.
We needn't have worried that all these emoluments were buttering us up for a bad movie-it's a really good one and likely to get Oscar nominations for Edward Norton, who not only stars as Lionel but also directs and co-wrote the screen adaptation from a novel. When I was grasping for the real world connection I thought I saw in this feature drama, my husband prompted me the sociopathic mogul, Moses Randolph, depicted by Alec Baldwin in the film is only a thinly papered over Robert Moses. That smasher of neighbourhoods in the name of grand schemes had a leading role in the 2016 documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, about Jane Jacobs and her fight for the soul of New York City. (That soul, I'm hearing, has suffered some blows of late.)
This 1950s period film has an instant classic feel to it. It has enough Hollywood dynamics and star power in it to pull in a larger audience but there's some very nice cinematography and lots of social relevance, both in the good old USA and in satellite nations like good old Canada, where I live, with regard to present-day politics and power-wielding at various levels by wealthy people. This is particularly the case when it comes to who runs city hall and gets to force out large numbers of people from the communities where they belong.
The city where I live has an ongoing struggle for which Motherless Brooklyn has relevant things to say. Even as I travelled to the cinema in question, I was distracted by the ugliness of the rapid-transit corridor it sits on which has been heavily redeveloped since the line went in for the 2010 Winter Olympics. The construction cranes are still plentiful, the featureless higher density buildings lining the route have an oppressive, mountain-view blocking dominance. Robert Moses/Moses Randolph or whoever wears their snappy shoes would love it.
Almost the only thing I was indifferent to in the film was the "brain thing" affliction of Norton's character, which seemed like some kind of cross between Tourette Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and a revisiting of Dustin Hoffman's Rainman character, at times. The syndrome had relevance to the story, though, and there were some nicer moments in how it was depicted.
In addition to Ed Norton's strong performance and Willem Defoe's decent contribution, I enjoyed seeing Michael Kenneth Williams as a mellow jazz musician (I always think of him as Omar in The Wire.) Alec Baldwin was convincingly evil, though I think some real life power mongers prettify their harsh decisions, to themselves and others.
