So, despite its origins in the ’90s and setting in the ’50s, Motherless Brooklyn is very much a film for the Trump era. is especially resonant when you’re going through moments that are giving people deep dismay.” I think there’s a lot of what we’re going through now that is provoking also a lot of looking at dimensions of what sits under the surface of what we call American life. “You have probably the deepest cynicism that had ever emerged in American society, and that film was responsive to that….

“It came out right when the Watergate scandal is breaking open, Vietnam is ending, Polanski’s wife has been murdered,” Norton said. Much as Lethem was inspired by classic detective fiction when writing Motherless Brooklyn, Norton has drawn from famous film noir-including probably the most famous one made after the genre’s heyday in the ’40s and ’50s, Chinatown. Those characters will be familiar to readers of the book, but as these first-look images make clear, the rest of Motherless Brooklyn is a new world entirely. But this fall, exactly 20 years later, Motherless Brooklyn is at last a reality, with Norton as the book’s unforgettable hero, Lionel Essrog, and Bruce Willis as Frank Minna, the paternal head of the seedy Brooklyn detective agency that’s employed Lionel since he was an orphaned teenager. What happened next is a familiar Hollywood story: delays, bad timing, years of puzzling out the script. New Line Cinema had optioned the book for what was reported as a “ sum in the high six-figures.” And most crucially, Lethem had signed off on Norton’s bold idea of shifting the modern-day detective story to the 1950s, taking the story’s central characters and jettisoning them off into a completely different adventure. Edward Norton, fresh off his Oscar nomination for American History X and about to open Fight Club, was ready to direct, produce, and star in an adaptation of the brand-new novel by Jonathan Lethem. It was the fall of 1999, and everything seemed to be lining up for Motherless Brooklyn.

Motherless brooklyn by jonathan lethem