Finding a husband is a priority of sorts, but so is having a good time. There are four other girls, all enjoying everything New York has to offer – jobs, money, clothes and men. She lodges with Mrs Kehoe (Julie Walters), in a boarding house in Brooklyn. Her life has been pre-arranged, thanks to Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), a benevolent Irish priest based in Brooklyn. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes.Saoirse Ronan is convincing in the film Brooklyn. ![]() ![]() Norton seems to have decided that the best way to celebrate Lionel’s underdog scrappiness was to build a monument in its honor. And its grandiosity undermines the ragged pleasures of the genre. ![]() The high-mindedness of the movie, its showy conviction that its heart is in the right place, dulls some of its political insights. He’s a kind of noble answer to the Joker, another beleaguered city dweller who explains his strange behavior with reference to a neurological condition. Lionel evolves a little too conveniently from misfit to paladin, from ally of the marginal and oppressed to their would-be savior. A fable of power dissipates in a fantasy of rescue. “Motherless Brooklyn” devotes a lot of time to explanation, which may be necessary given the intricacy of the plot, but which turns into a lecture after a while. Lionel goes into battle without the armor of cynicism that most movie private eyes before him have worn instead, he is clad in a righteousness that is ultimately hard to distinguish from vanity. His decency is the axis on which the story turns, and also the movie’s principal flaw. Lionel is the little guy who sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong and sniffs out the corruption of the big shots - the racism, petty cruelty and sexual depravity underneath the grand conspiracies. Norton places him, plausibly enough, at the center of a tale of large-scale malfeasance and personal vice that suggests a variation on “Chinatown.” Postwar New York real estate takes the place of Depression-era Los Angeles water as the all-consuming obsession at the heart of the story. Randolph, played with the bullying dynamism that is Baldwin’s finest, strongest note, is traced over the likeness of Robert Moses, a storied and polarizing figure in New York history. They are sometimes played for comedy, though not in a cruel way - Norton is as protective of the character’s dignity as Lionel is solicitous of the vulnerable souls who come his way - and sometimes mined for morals. (Lethem specifies Tourette’s syndrome the movie doesn’t hazard a diagnosis.) Lionel’s physical twitches and tics are often accompanied by bursts of wordplay that are more poetic than profane. He has some problems with his brain, a condition he likens to living with “an anarchist” who happens to be relentlessly detail-oriented. But Lionel, played by Edward Norton, who also wrote and directed “Motherless Brooklyn” (loosely adapted from Jonathan Lethem’s novel of the same name) is tenderhearted rather than hard-boiled. The cars are boxy, the men wear fedoras, steam rises from the manhole covers and jazz wafts through the air. ![]() The Dodgers are still in Brooklyn, though Walter O’Malley is threatening to move them to California. Lionel Essrog - people also call him Brooklyn, and sometimes Freakshow - is a New York gumshoe, plying his trade in the 1950s.
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