David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: Motherless
Brooklyn and Harriet)
Motherless Brooklyn
Playing a detective with Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) in a
hard noir set in 1950s New York is tough enough. Edward Norton also directed,
produced and freely adapted Motherless
Brooklyn from Jonathan Lethem’s novel (and here is a neat trivia tangent:
Art Carney, who played sewer worker Ed Norton on The Honeymooners, starred in his own excellent neo-noir, The Late Show). At 50 Norton has what
may well be his career apex. “Brooklyn” is Lionel Essrog’s nickname, though his
gumshoe partners, with snarky affection, also call him “Freak Show.” A thought
or a name will often trigger a loud outburst from Lionel’s speed-dial brain.
The word “brisket” launches him into a bris
(circumcision) joke. “A piece of my head broke off,” he laments, “and decided
to keep on ridin’ me for kicks.”
Funny, because his spit-zip bursts fly like cartoon
shrapnel. Lionel tries to muffle these
outcries, yet must often give a sheepish explanation (he doesn’t know the name
Tourette’s). Norton finds wit and pathos in the handicap, achieves a kind of
TS/OCD deepening, without the schtick-fest of Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man. At the heart (a real one) is
how Lionel becomes the main man, tracking the killers of his boss (Bruce Willis
has one big, juicy sequence), who prized his savvy and memory and simply liked
him. The curling case will take Lionel past his hustling partners into chasms of
corruption ruled by the power octopus Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, a blitz of
tongue, brain and bulk). Randolph is, of course, Robert Moses, the city’s
mid-century “empire builder” who snacked on mayors and governors. We realize
that the core source, beyond the Scorsese crime sprees or Farewell My Lovely (a huge thug echoes Moose Malloy in that) is the
most elegant of neo-noirs: 1974’s Chinatown.
As in that stunner, family secrets poison the
intrigues and there is much knot-folding of plot strands. Baldwin fuses John
Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown to
the ruthless Robert Moses of Robert Caro’s definitive biography (called “Jake”
the private eye bleats “I’m Lionel, not Jake!” – a wink at Jake Gittes of Chinatown). There is more hipness at a
Harlem jazz club, where Lionel’s riffs and tics jive with the bop notes of the trumpeter (angry but cool Michael Kenneth
Williams). The sequence also lets the story’s smart beauty (Gugu Mbatha-Raw)
see that odd, lonely Lionel is a guy who might be trusted, perhaps loved. That
Norton dives so far into the character keeps this from becoming just another
fond rummage of the noir files. That the whole effort keeps flowing on track is
fairly miraculous. Norton cast very
well, notably Bobby Cannavale and Dallas Roberts as gumshoes, Cherry Jones as a
populist firebrand and Willem Dafoe, in his Van Gogh beard again, as an urban
dreamer sickened by rot.
In the Naked
City lineage, Motherless Brooklyn
is a hymn for old New York. Dick Pope’s cinematography achieves a fresh retro
take on the great noir city, rivaling the unrelated Bill Pope's sexy 1950s Manhattan in Fur. This goes beyond all-night diners
and brownstones and a rotary phone shot like an idol, beyond Scorsesean rips of
violence and some Spike Lee riffs of blackitude, climaxing in a gorgeous restaging
of Penn Station (photo above). The Moses monuments endure, yet the old, dirty,
teeming, dangerous town is the one we relish. It may lack the silken purity of Chinatown or the inspired ’40s to ’70s
blend of The Long Goodbye, yet this
original vision packed with derivations is a hard, meaty fist you cannot
duck.
Harriet
It is difficult not to be pious when your movie’s
subject is on a U.S. postal stamp. Harriet Tubman got her stamp in 1978, 65
years after dying. It is planned that her shrewd survivor’s face will arrive on
the $20 bill. Now she has a film, Harriet
– solid, sincere, not groaningly pious, yet it might be better. Director Kasi
Lemmons has shown good instincts (Talk to
Me) and wayward ones (The Caveman’s
Valentine, a hash that even Samuel L. Jackson couldn’t save). Harriet lands in-between, though closer
to Talk. You can bet $20 that people
who love her stamp, and will love her money image, will want to see this.
Because it simplifies the complex hero’s story with genuine passion. And because
Cynthia Erivo is such a close but youthful replica of photos of the aged Tubman
(Erivo also looks somewhat like Whoopi Goldberg, and won a Tony for re-creating
on Broadway Goldberg’s Celie in The Color
Purple).
Born around 1820 in Maryland, Araminta “Minty” Ross
(Harriet became her free name) was an illiterate slave. She was whipped, and
suffered a brain injury when a lead weight, hurled by an overseer at another
slave, hit her. Her husband, the freedman John Tubman, remarried when he
thought she had died while escaping. Her flight (running, running, running)
from racists and their hounds is the most exciting and defining sequence. Minty
flees by sheer will, with help from the new Underground Railroad network, a
feat likely impossible had she been in the lower South. She becomes a canny,
lucky liberator whom blacks would call Moses (she freed over 70). Erivo keeps
Harriet alert and grounded, no simple symbol. But the script seeks extra
dimension through that brain injury, which led to Tubman’s falling spells,
“visions” and “voices.” Religious, she felt guided by providence. Here that
becomes blue-sepia flashbacks, coded messaging through spirituals, and a
quickly formed myth (which doesn’t save her return trips into Maryland from
falling into a here-we-go-again rhythm).
Historical tributes include elisions, so Frederick
Douglass and John Brown flit by as tiny cameos (Tubman recruited men for
Brown’s fabled raid). Nobody speaks in “yassuh” dialect, the violence is vivid
but brief, and a viciously smug white, Gideon (Joe Alwyn), distills the racist
hotbloods of Old Dixie. That is the sort of Morse code that rich history
doesn’t need, notably when Harriet out-machos Gideon and, using her mental
powers, taunts him about the coming doom of “the Lost Cause” (a term not in use
until after the war). John Toll’s plush photography lays on a slight patina of
sacred memory, the “Spielberg loves De Mille” shellac. But Harriet Tubman remains too movingly rooted in tough truth to be much slighted by such things.
SALAD (A List)
The Most
Creative Neo-Noirs
The ten best, all after the classic period (1940-60),
with director and year:
The Long
Goodbye (Robert Altman 1973), Chinatown (Roman Polanski 1974), Jackie
Brown (Quentin Tarantino 1997), Point
Blank (John Boorman 1967), Blade Runner
(Ridley Scott 1982), Motherless Brooklyn
(Ed Norton 2019), The Late Show
(Robert Benton 1978), Inherent Vice
(P.T. Anderson 2014), Devil in a Blue
Dress (Carl Franklin 1995) and L.A.Confidential
(Curtis Hanson 1997).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire
de Chateau Welles)
Orson
is burning angelic oil at the Celestial Cinematheque, for his total restoration
of The Magnificent Ambersons.
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The
insecurity of social virgin and middle-class striver Alice (Katharine Hepburn)
at her first, classy dance in Alice Adams
“is a pressure cooker, one approaching the anxious self-consciousness of witty
writer and raconteur Alexander King’s first visit to the opera: ‘I was embedded
in such perfumes, such hair oils, such pomades and hairdos on all sides that I thought
I was suddenly going to rise up to the crystal chandeliers with the wonderful
odor and ecstasy of it all. There was one depressing note in this glittering
assembly, however: me.” (From the
Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle).
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Land
baron Noah Cross (John Huston, left) proves himself a devil to private eye Jake
Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown
(Paramount Pictures 1974; director Roman Polanski, d.p. John Alonzo).
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