BeatRoute Magazine BC Edition - November 2019

SCREEN
TIME
JAZZING IT UP: THE MUSIC
OF MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
In conversation with Edward
Norton about how jazz is
the backbone of his new film
Motherless Brooklyn
By PAT MULLEN
E
dward
Norton juggles riffs and
rhythms as actor, writer, and director
of Motherless Brooklyn. The film, a
passion project 20 years in the making,
stars Norton as Lionel Essrog, a
detective with Tourette syndrome navigating
the criminal underworld of 1950s Brooklyn.
Motherless Brooklyn adapts Jonathan Lethem’s
novel of the same name as Lionel uncovers
a case of racial discrimination in the city’s
housing market, touring through jazz clubs
and political rallies while investigating the
death of his mentor and falling in love with
an activist named Laura (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).
Fuelled by the jazzy rhythms of the city, the
film is a symphony of racial tensions and altered
scales.
Norton, speaking with BeatRoute at Toronto
International Film Festival, says he adapted
Lethem’s 1990s-set novel for the 50s to
increase the audience’s empathy for Lionel.
“The novel is really about the experience of
being inside this character’s brain, knowing
him, and feeling empathy as you watch him
navigate this painful and funny affliction,”
says Norton.
The beat and syntax of Jazz help put the audience
inside Lionel’s head. “One of the arguments
for acting and directing was knowing I
could experiment with the condition, but also
sculpt the balance of the performance in the
editing room,” explains Norton. The rhythms
of jazz lend Lionel’s spastic tics a certain musicality
as Norton’s performance evokes a
musician riffing on the scales and echoes the
drum beats and trumpet toots of Daniel Pemberton’s
score.
The film makes the connection between
jazz and Tourette’s explicit when Lionel encounters
a trumpet player at a club. “I feel
about Lionel the way the trumpet player
communicates to him saying, ‘I know that
headspace.’ It’s a gift, but it’s a brain affliction
just the same,” explains Norton.
“Lionel says back to the trumpet player,
‘But you have a way to push it out and make
it sound pretty.’ If I laugh lots of times, I feel
lucky to have a vehicle for it. If the dial got
turned up a little bit, it could be a paralyzing
mental state.” Norton’s empathetic performance
draws upon Lionel’s unavoidable
awkwardness without making light of it.
Motherless Brooklyn further evokes Lionel’s
struggle through an original song,
“Daily Battles” by Thom Yorke. “Thom expresses
this duality of longing in the heart,
but also psychic terror, fracture, and dissonance,”
says Norton. “Musically, he expresses
Lionel’s headspace perfectly for me.”
“Daily Battles” echoes throughout the
soundtrack with classic and contemporary
variations, including one by Pulitzer
Prize-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis,
who curated the jazz selections in the club
scenes. “When Laura reaches out and is so
empathetic to Lionel, senses his distress,
and helps calm him down, I was nervous
about using a known jazz ballad,” explains
Norton. “The last thing you want to do is
take people out of that moment if they recognize
the song or get distracted. Wynton
did this beautiful arrangement of Thom’s
song and played it like a Miles Davis ballad
from the Birth of the Cool era.”
Norton says that Yorke’s ballad captured
the essence of the story so strongly that it
inspired a revision to the script. “I put it in
the scene when Lionel complains about his
condition and Laura says, ‘We all have our
daily battles.’
“Laura is a Black woman who’s a lawyer
in the 50s and everyone only sees her as a
secretary,” explains Norton. “You have to
pick yourself up and out of your personal
struggles and engage with the bigger fights.”
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