'Motherless Brooklyn' Asks: What's Important Enough to Devote a Life To? | Sojourners

'Motherless Brooklyn' Asks: What's Important Enough to Devote a Life To?

Ed Norton (right) and Alec Baldwin star in Motherless Brooklyn. Photo courtesy Warner Bros.

Motherless Brooklyn, writer-director-star Edward Norton’s adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, is confident enough in its own scope to begin with Shakespeare, and it certainly backs up this confidence with an argument. A quotation from Measure for Measure invites us to reflect on the nature of power: “O! It is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”

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