The plot’s set in motion when his boss, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis, not really trying his hardest) is murdered, leading the private eye to the office of Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, in real estate blowhard mode) - a thinly veiled stand-in for Robert Moses, the mid-20th century “master builder” with a knack for disenfranchisement of minorities and the poor. Gumshoe narrator Lionel Essrog (Norton, who also directs) has Tourette’s syndrome, which for him causes startling verbal outbursts and the compulsion to touch things - and, more inconveniently, people - repetitively. Recasting from a modern-day setting into the 1950s and crafting a largely different plot, Norton still captures the spirit of the book’s unusual narrator and its love for the borough, in a gorgeously shot retro New York. It’s been 20 years since Jonathan Lethem published “ Motherless Brooklyn,” and Edward Norton has been trying to make the novel into a movie for almost as long.
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