MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (US - 2019) Written and directed by Edward Norton. Cast: Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones, Michael Kenneth Williams, Leslie Mann, Ethan Suplee, Dallas Roberts, Fisher Stevens, Josh Pais, Robert Ray Wisdom, Radu Spinghel, Peter Lewis, Stephen Adley Guirgis, DeShawn White. (R, 144 mins) If it seems like MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN is the kind of film that's been frozen in ice since 2002 and is just now getting thawed, that could be because director/writer/star Edward Norton has been shepherding it through a nearly two-decade development since he purchased the movie rights to Jonathan Lethem's acclaimed novel shortly after it was published in 1999. But it's also because this is the kind of prestige piece that's becoming an increasingly rare commodity in multiplexes these days. A complex NYC noir with echoes of CHINATOWN and a generous helping of the kind of big-city corruption that's reminiscent of Sidney Lumet, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN probably would've received a more welcome reception as a period HBO or Netflix miniseries, where it would've earned significant acclaim and cleaned up at the Emmys and the Golden Globes. But in theaters, it's a different story. Warner Bros. even seemed to lose confidence in it as the release date approached, knocking it down to 1300 screens in the days before it opened, even after a relentless TV ad blitz in the preceding weeks. The sad fact is that times have changed, and in an era when everything has to be a blockbuster, this kind of modest, mid-level production doesn't bring in the crowds anymore, whether you want to call it a movie for "grownups" or one that's geared toward "older audiences," or simply, a "dad movie." There's plenty of explanations--the trend toward mega-budget franchises, the fact that it'll be on VOD and Blu-ray in three or four months, and that, let's be honest, Norton hasn't headlined a hit movie in a long time. Even though it's a top-notch "dad movie," it's still a small miracle that MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN is in theaters at all.
Norton takes so many liberties with Lethem's novel that one could argue the film is its own separate thing. Two major changes: he moves the setting from the then-present late 1990s to the late 1950s (his feeling being that the use of hard-boiled dialogue in the present day worked on the page but would seem too ironic and gimmicky on the screen, and he's right, since BRICK already beat him to it), and he invents a major character exclusive to the film in one Moses Randolph, a venal political power player inspired by notorious Manhattan city planner and parks commissioner Robert Moses, whose post-Depression projects ran up debt and seemed insidiously designed to isolate black neighborhoods, thus propagating the long decline in areas that became slums and ghettos in the ensuing decades. As loose as Norton plays with Lethem's source work, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN works as a well-made, leisurely-paced, and very character-driven film that unfolds like a good book, with a memorable hero in Lionel Essrog (Norton), who has Tourette's and can't stop shouting inappropriate things at the wrong time. On one hand, this feels like another chance for Norton to do his PRIMAL FEAR/THE SCORE schtick, but fortunately, Norton the actor is kept in check by Norton the director, who's careful to avoid turning his long-gestating pet project into a self-indulgent vanity project.
Lionel works as part of the investigative crew of Brooklyn gumshoe Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who affectionately calls him "Brooklyn" and makes use of Lionel's ability to remember even the most trivial of details. The crew--which also consists of Tony (Bobby Cannavale), Gilbert (Ethan Suplee), and Danny (Dallas Roberts)--have been with Frank since they were kids, when they were all in an orphanage and he took them under his wing. When Frank is killed (aaaand...exit Bruce Willis 15 minutes in) during a dangerous meet in a fleabag hotel with some mystery men--where Frank hid a phone in a dresser drawer so Lionel could listen at a pay phone across the street--Lionel becomes fixated on piecing together the puzzle of meaningless words and phrases from the conversation to find out what Frank was up to and why he wouldn't clue them in. Lionel's pursuit of numerous disparate leads--Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a legal aid for civil rights and gentrification activist Gabby Hurwitz (Cherry Jones); a jazz club owned by Laura's father (Robert Ray Wisdom); a worldly jazz trumpeter (Michael Kenneth Williams); a disgruntled engineer (Willem Dafoe, midway through growing his LIGHTHOUSE beard) who's fallen on hard times; and Randolph (Alec Baldwin), who runs a dozen powerful city offices but remains an unelected public official with enough juice to bully the mayor (Peter Lewis) into bending to his will--eventually comes together, though he gets roughed up several times by a group of Randolph goons led by Lou (Fisher Stevens) and lets things get personal when he realizes that Laura's life is in danger.
Norton's tic-filled performance can be big but it's never hammy, and it's a welcome approach that everyone seems to understand that there's something wrong with his head that makes him act the way he does. He often has to explain that "It's like a piece of my head broke off and is just joyriding me," followed by something like "Giant faggot munchkin meat!" or "Tits on a Tuesday!" or, if he gets really worked up, a loud "IF!" accompanied by a wild head thrash. Even though the other guys in Frank's office call him "Freakshow," it's a term of endearment among them, as they demonstrably take his insights and opinions seriously. Norton's Lionel is a real character instead of a series of awards-baiting outbursts. The creation of Baldwin's Moses Randolph serves to add social and historical commentary to the story line with the dead-on Robert Moses parallels, as well as an obvious, and maybe slightly ham-fisted modern political allegory, with Baldwin's performance being a significantly less cartoonish interpretation of his SNL Donald Trump impression (Randolph even quotes him nearly verbatim at one point, arguing the semantics of rape and stating "When you're powerful, you can do anything you want"). The Trumpification of Robert Moses into Moses Randolph helps MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN become a film of its time in ways that it couldn't have had Norton made this 20 years ago, though, admittedly, die-hard devotees of Lethem's novel probably won't be enthused about these additional layers.
"Bruce, I said I'd *try* to get you out of here
in one day, but I never made any guarantees."
At 144 minutes, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN may run a little long, but it's always engrossing, and the only weak spot is the perpetually inconvenienced Willis, continuing to give Steven Seagal a run for his rubles as the laziest actor alive. It's really something to watch the way Norton has to shoot Frank's meeting with the four Randolph goons in a gimmicky way to cover for Willis obviously not being there with Fisher Stevens and the other actors. The hotel room is dark and shadowy and the image drifts in and out of focus in an almost hallucinatory fashion for no reason, with Willis obviously doubled from the back (the guy's head isn't even shaped like Willis') and his close-ups are always just him with no one else in the shot when he's responding to someone's questions. This sequence is in the first ten minutes and it actually gets the film off to a clunky start because it looks like Norton is going for some pointless auteur wankery right out of the gate until you realize that it's this way because Willis can't even be bothered to show up for work on good movies, let alone Lionsgate's landmark, ongoing "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series. When Norton was on the dais of Comedy Central's roast of Willis last year, with MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN already wrapped, he wondered if he could get away with the things Willis does: "Could I just leave the set of a movie after my close-ups are done and have my co-stars act opposite a C-stand with a red X taped to it while a script girl reads my dialogue to them?" Gentle ribbing or spoken from experience?
THE COMEDIAN (US/UK/China - 2016) Directed by Taylor Hackford. Written by Art Linson, Jeff Ross, Richard LaGravenese and Lewis Friedman. Cast: Robert De Niro, Leslie Mann, Danny DeVito, Harvey Keitel, Edie Falco, Charles Grodin, Cloris Leachman, Patti Lupone, Lucy DeVito, Veronica Ferres, Lois Smith. (R, 120 mins) It's pretty ballsy of Robert De Niro to attempt comedy in the same year he gave us the unspeakable DIRTY GRANDPA, but THE COMEDIAN (given a very limited Oscar-eligibility run in December 2016 but only now rolling out nationwide) is a project he and producer/co-writer Art Linson have had in various stages of development for nearly a decade. If there's a sense of familiarity to the end result, it's coming from a couple of different directions: De Niro already tackled stand-up comedy decades ago in Martin Scorsese's 1983 cult classic THE KING OF COMEDY, and the whole idea of following a working, schlepping stand-up has been seen over several seasons of Louis C.K.'s revered FX series LOUIE. Hell, there's even a scene of De Niro walking down the street and shaking hands with the door guy as he walks down into the entrance of the Comedy Cellar, almost straight out of LOUIE's opening credits. All that's missing is a revamped theme song that goes "Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, Bobbbbyyyyyy!"
De Niro is Jackie Burke, a 67-year-old shock comic best known for a MARRIED WITH CHILDREN-style sitcom he did in the 1980s called EDDIE'S HOME, where he played a working-class blowhard cop named Eddie, as crass as Al Bundy and with his own catchphrase he always shouted to his wife: "Arleeeeeeene!" Now scraping by doing nostalgia gigs in rinky-dink clubs where he shares the bill with Brett Butler and Jimmie Walker (a ton of stand-up luminaries young and old appear in cameos as themselves), Jackie is confronted in mid-act by heckling fan demanding he shout his catchphrase. A scuffle ensues resulting in Jackie decking the guy and the whole thing is caught on cell phone video and goes viral. After refusing to apologize to the guy in court, he's sentenced to 30 days in jail and 100 hours of community service. Once he's out, he spends his community service hours at a NYC soup kitchen where he befriends Harmony (Leslie Mann), who's also spending court-appointed time after assaulting her philandering boyfriend and his other girlfriend. Harmony is desperately trying to find a place for herself after spending most of her adult life screwing up and blowing opportunities, and wants to get out from under the thumb of her wealthy, mob-connected father Mac Schiltz (Harvey Keitel), refusing his offer to buy her out of her sentence with a judge friend and move down to his Florida home. Instead, she bonds with Jackie and a tentative romance blossoms as Jackie tries to rebuild his career, which is stuck in an endless rut: even though his fellow stand-ups revere him for his stage act, all any TV execs and fans on the street want from him is "Eddie" and his stupid catchphrase.
Considering he probably can't go a day without someone quipping "You talkin' to me?" to him, there's a lot of De Niro in Jackie as everyone he encounters demands he give them an "Arleeeeeene!" But THE COMEDIAN stumbles where it matters most: De Niro's stand-up bits as Jackie just aren't funny. Often, they're cringe-inducing in a bad way and too reliant not just on playing blue but going for that same kind of pointless raunch and childishly scatalogical way that torpedoed DIRTY GRANDPA. Is this a De Niro thing? Is this his sense of humor? Is Jackie playing to a crowd of seniors in a retirement home and changing the words of "Makin' Whoopee!" to "Makin' Poopie!" supposed to be funny? Considering Jackie's status as a legend among his peers (Jim Norton, after another Jackie video blows up online: "You're more viral than Charlie Sheen!"), his routine is pretty hacky, whether he's entertaining the homeless at the shelter or cracking gay and Jewish jokes at his niece's (Lucy DeVito) wedding to her same-sex partner, an act that includes one-liners about collecting the semen of homeless guys and doesn't go over well with Jackie's long-suffering brother Jimmy (Danny DeVito) and his shrewish wife Flo (Patti Lupone). While the stage bits tank, there's other pleasures to be had with THE COMEDIAN: it's great to see De Niro and DeVito busting each others' balls in their scenes together, and it's always a welcome sight to see De Niro and Keitel onscreen together, especially when Jackie talks about wanting to "bang the shit out of" Harmony and calls Mac "Pops."
Director Taylor Hackford and the screenwriters (among them Linson, journeyman Richard LaGravenese, and "Roastmaster General" Jeff Ross) take the story down an admirably dark detour when Jackie's long-suffering manager (Edie Falco) gets him a spot on the dais at a Friars Club roast of the beloved, 95-year-old Betty White-like screen and TV legend May Miller (Cloris Leachman) and she drops dead in the middle of his turn at the mic ("I didn't even get to my best lines!" Jackie grumbles). Terence Blanchard's melancholy jazz score combined with the location work in a Manhattan where it's constantly raining and gray does a wonderful job of conveying the sense of gloom and desperation Jackie feels over his career, with Hackford really succeeding in creating a very authentic "New York City" feel that makes the city an actual character in the story, and that's something you don't see much of these days. Likewise with the setting, there's also occasions where it has somewhat of a Woody Allen mix of comedy and drama going on, especially with the romantic pairing of 73-year-old De Niro and 44-year-old Mann. THE COMEDIAN has genuine affection for the world of the working comedian, and the roster of cameos is impressive--Norton (who served as a technical adviser), Butler, Walker, Hannibal Buress, Nick DiPaolo, Billy Crystal, Richard Belzer, Gilbert Gottfried, Stewie Stone, and Freddie Roman among others can be spotted--but Jackie's routines just don't cut it, even though the audience and everyone else within earshot are always doubled over with laughter. De Niro nails the body language, the stage presence, and the mannerisms of a veteran stand-up, but his act sounds like stuff that didn't make the cut of DIRTY GRANDPA (jokes about jerking off, pulling out, making the cunnilingus gesture at May, etc), and the improbably feel-good ending is just lazy. There's a charming, insightful film that manages to make its presence known throughout THE COMEDIAN, but the comedy doesn't hold up its end of the bargain
