New York Film Festival 2019 (forum)

[Chris Knipp]

EDWARD NORTON, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

NYFF Closing Night Film:
Edward Norton's MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

The movie will have its New York premiere at Alice Tully Hall Friday, October 11, 2019, ending the Main Slate presentations of the Sept. 27-Oct. 13 NYFF. Warner Bros. will release it Nov. 1.

A nostalgic, semi-musical New York noir to close the fest

Edward Norton stars, directs, and wrote the adaptation of the Jonathan Lethem novel, which he has transfered from contemporary Brooklyn to Fifties New York in a more overtly neo-noir format. The protagonist Lionel Essrog (Norton) is a lonely private dick with Tourette's syndrome who gets drawn into a multi-layered conspiracy expanding to include racial conflicts in the city as he solves his friend’s murder. Armed only with a few clues and the powerful engine of his obsessive mind, Lionel unravels closely-guarded secrets that hold the fate of the whole city in the balance.. There is a devious 'master builder' personality like the planner Robert Moses (Alec Baldwin). There are supporting performances by Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Leslie Mann, and Cherry Jones. A score by Daniel Pemberton has orchestration by Wynton Marsalis and an original song by Thom Yorke. The NYFF director and selection committee chair Kent Jones says Norton uses Lethem's novel "as a jumping-off point" for a "wildly imaginative" and "extravagant" "love letter to New York". He calls it "a beautifully told semi-musical hard-boiled yarn grounded in the mid-20th century history of the city."

So the 2019 NYFF defines its rootedness in the city by being framed by three New York stories: a mafia, labor boss conspiracy and murder by New Yorker Martin Scorsese; a New York family breakup tale from Noah Baumbach; and a noir reworking of a novel set in Brooklyn.