![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Mbatha-Raw plays Laura, a Harlem activist doing battle with a racist, power-mad, eminent domain-wielding Alec Baldwin, whose character’s name is “Moses Randolph,” though he is very obviously channeling infamous “master builder” Robert Moses. (The book specifies that he has Tourette’s the movie opts for the vaguer “I got something wrong in my head.”) “Kiss her face all night, Bailey!” he blurts out shortly after meeting semi-cute with Mbatha-Raw, and she giggles, though Lionel’s further gently sincere explanations for these outbursts-“I say funny things, but I’m not trying to be funny”-allow him some measure of leeway, even when he’s blurting out, for example, “Tits on a Tuesday!” Norton directed, and wrote the screenplay, and moved the action from the present day to the ultra-noir 1950s, and stars as Lionel Essrog, a struggling NYC private eye prone to harsh facial tics and wild gestures and bombastic verbal outbursts. The movie is Motherless Brooklyn, loosely adapted from Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, a hard-boiled but soft-hearted mystery yarn that has aged better than most turn-of-the-century literary sensations written by men named Jonathan. Totally simple, so long as I don’t try to explain anything else about it. Let me tell you about my favorite 2019 movie scene to date, which is a simple thing, really: Edward Norton and Gugu Mbatha-Raw slow dance to a smoky jazz ballad. ![]()
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