Norton's Noir Nouveau

The thing about Edward Norton is he was never really here—or so it seemed. Sure, as a 26-year-old in his first big movie, 1996’s Primal Fear, his hair-raising performance as a possibly homicidal altar boy nabbed him an Oscar nomination. Critics and moviegoers started asking, between breathless comparisons to everyone from DiCaprio to Hoffman, Who is this guy?

But as vivid as he could be on-screen, offscreen Norton ghosted us all. Letting the work tell the story, he made a shell game out of his dealings with the press, shunning inter­views and ducking questions about his personal life—especially when he bulked up by 30 pounds and scored a best actor Oscar nomination for his gut-wrenching neo-Nazi turn in 1998’s Amer­ican History X.

Through the aughts, Norton continued to protect his off-camera life while keeping his screen profile high, if unclassifiable. He mostly avoided Hollywood cash grabs, grav­itating instead to a range of complex roles: a pornographer’s soft-spoken lawyer, a feckless drug dealer, a bipolar dude with a latent flair for violence, a green superhero with rage issues and an egomaniacal actor—for, respectively, cream-of-the-crop di­rectors Miloš Forman (The People vs. Larry Flynt), Spike Lee (25th Hour), David Fincher (Fight Club), Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman; yet an­other Oscar nomination).

By then a certain reputation had emerged, one fed by Norton’s widely publicized head-on collisions with the directors of Amer­ican History X and Red Dragon and the battles with Marvel that likely factored into Mark Ruffalo taking over as the Hulk. One common denominator: By many accounts, if Norton thought a script needed an overhaul, he’d doctor it himself and try to per­suade the director to get onboard.

Then he went relatively quiet, aside from supporting turns in The Grand Budapest Hotel and Collateral Beauty, and voice stints in Sausage Party (he helped Seth Rogen get that one made) and Isle of Dogs. Was Norton staging a vanishing act? Had he be­come one of those actors, per endless online speculation, that Hollywood won’t hire?

Not so fast. Aside from being busy as a husband (to movie pro­ducer Shauna Robertson), the father of a now six-year-old son, a scuba diver and pilot, a tireless environmental advocate, a trustee of an affordable-housing nonprofit and a producer on more than a dozen documentaries and feature films (including last year’s Gotti), Norton has been quietly preparing to step back into the spotlight.

The $26 million movie Motherless Brooklyn, in wide release this November, revolves around his performance as Lionel Essrog—a sad, solitary private detective with Tourette syndrome who struggles to make sense of a morally and politically rancid world following the murder of his mobbed-up mentor (Bruce Wil­lis). Watching the gritty yet open-heartedly romantic movie, which Norton also directed, produced and adapted from Jona­than Lethem’s 1999 novel, you can almost feel the man stepping out and showing us what matters to him, what’s eating at him, what he thinks of the state of things in America in 2019. So that’s who Edward Norton is.

Speaking almost as rapidly and obsessively as his gumshoe pro­tagonist, Norton describes his near 20-year campaign to launch the movie, whose knockout cast includes Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe, Bobby Cannavale, Gugu Mbatha-Raw (pictured above with Norton in a scene from the film), Michael K. Williams and Leslie Mann. “My emotional connection to the book was this character who lets you know from the beginning, ‘I’ve got something wrong with my head,’” he says. “You almost instinctively feel aligned with him from square one, because you’re inside his brain and you feel how fucked-up and chaotic his condition is. You can hear from deep down inside that he’s not, as people call him, a ‘freak show’ but a smart, sensitive soul. In many ways, he’s in the best tradition of afflicted underdog heroes, like in Rain Man, Forrest Gump, A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting. We connect with our better selves by cheering for them.”

While Lethem set his novel in contemporary New York, Nor­ton’s script throws things back to paranoid, bigoted urban life in the 1950s, pitting his hero against a set of social attitudes, preju­dices and politically powerful monsters that, in the dark shadow of current events, seem all too apt. “I wanted to do a serious noir,” he explains, “not the clichéd, glossy, Americanized dime-store version—a movie that said, ‘Look, there’s a lot of skeevy shit going on, a lot of stuff churning underneath the surface, and we ignore it at our peril.’ I mean, it isn’t coincidental that Chinatown arrived on the cusp of Watergate, the end of the Vietnam war and after its director’s wife had been murdered by Manson followers. I set this movie in a 1950s New York that was beyond crime, when things were being done at a level so antagonistic to what we think of as ‘America’ that the city was under the almost autocratic, im­perial rule of a Darth Vader who exerted his will on everything.”

As perfectionistic and self-critical as Norton can be about his work behind and before the camera (of this project he admits, “I have a sort of creeping contentment about it”), he’s effusive when it comes to his collaborators—including his aforementioned Darth Vader, played by Baldwin.

“Alec has such a unique combination of charm and terrible power to intimidate,” Norton says. “I wrote quite an aria for him, a celebration of brute power. And when he dug down and deliv­ered that monologue in which his character talks about how, if he wanted to do it with a ‘colored girl’ in a hotel room, then pow,he was going to do it as his right and privilege, he was lethal. I saw the crew’s jaws hit the floor.”

Cast as the movie’s most abusive power broker, Baldwin con­jures the toxic essence of the influential predators and racists currently making headlines. Therein may lie the key to Norton’s elusive, undeniable genius.

“The best feeling,” he says, “is when it resonates like a tuning fork with the times we live in.”