Norton's Noir Nouveau

WITH MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, EDWARD NORTON HAS CREATED A MOVIE A S INTELLIGENT, COMPLEX AND POLITICALLY ENGAGED AS THE MAN HIMSELF

- Stephen Rebello

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 MiloS 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.