I watched the recent film “Motherless Brooklyn” last night. I thought it was a terrifically entertaining film. But it’s a bit weird, because it has the same name, and the same central characters as the book Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, but an almost totally different story line. When lead actor Edward Norton took up the task of putting the book on film as both director and star, he did it in a unique way. He rewrote the story line…..entirely.
It’s Brooklyn in the late 1950s. There’s a small time detective, Frank Minna, who runs an odd agency with four younger men whom he mentored out of an orphanage years before. Frank is involved in something that seems less than legal, and is killed. This happens in the very first few minutes of the film. It is at this point that the book and film completely diverge. The story of who killed Frank and why, and how the truth was discovered is different is completely changed, as are all the other characters who were in the book.
I don’t want to give away the plot line, only to tell you that it has to do with Robert Moses (renamed in the film, and not at all involved with the plot in the book), and his rebuilding of New York at the expense of the poor blacks and Latinos and their neighborhoods, and a secret that could expose him in the city where he exerts much more power than anyone else. And that once the secret is discovered, the question is what to do about, and how to protect those who know from his unbridled ambition and his belief that he is, as he says, not “above the law”, but “in front of the law”.
It’s a long film, 2 1/2 hours, but I thought well worth it.
Arthur Thinks (He Thinks) 