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So even though Motherless Brooklyn came out in 2019 I only saw it a few nights ago. This is because Motherless Brooklyn is one of my favourite books, in general I love the works of Jonathan Lethem, and the movie adaption looked like the vanity project of someone who managed to both love the novel and miss the point of it entirely.
The movie takes the book from modern day New York and shifts the story to 1950’s New York and imposes it on the background of a story about Robert Moses, cleverly renamed as Moses Randolph, and the transformation of Brooklyn. Which is a great story, I myself am mostly motivated to do a deep dive into the history of Robert Moses and how he ran New York without holding an elected office.
But that’s not the story of the book. The only element left intact is Lionel, a wanna be private detective with Tourette’s syndrome and a vague nod to the four youths rescued from an orphanage by their mentor Frank Minna. In the books he’s a criminal pretending to be a private detective, in the movie he’s a private detective looking to become a criminal by dipping into extortion.
The family drama between Frank and his brother is entirely excised. Instead that becomes a struggle between Moses Rudolph and the brother who set out to destroy each other. In the books Lionel is a kid who gets bullied but…
