Rather than just veer into hard-boiled detective fiction with his take on the source material, Norton uses film noir as an aesthetic framework for Motherless Brooklyn, but doesn’t totally drink from the well, so to speak.
On top of a litany of reasons that Mbatha-Raw herself explained when we sat down to discuss Motherless Brooklyn, the other big touchstones that separate this character, and this film, from film noir traditions is a current of kindness that runs through the work that novelist Jonathan Lethem and writer Edward Norton have done on the film adaptation of this previously contemporary novel that the director took on as a passion project 20 years ago.