Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn Gets a Nostalgic New York Tribute
Nostalgia was in the air at the closing night gala for this year’s New York Film Festival, which ended with the city’s premiere of Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn. At the glam afterparty at Jazz at Lincoln Center, hosted by Vanity Fair and sponsored by Richard Mille, Norton, dressed in a slim gray suit, schmoozed the night away with friends and colleagues, including Motherless stars Bobby Cannavale and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and well-wishers like author Michael Eric Dyson and retiring NYFF director Kent Jones.
“Lotta colleagues, lotta old friends, theater friends,” Norton told V.F. with a grin, surveying the crowd. "I’ve been in New York 30 years, so I know a lot of people."
At the film‘s 9:30 screening at Alice Tully Hall, attended by the film’s stars like Cannavale, Mbatha-Raw, Bruce Willis and Willem Dafoe, as well as supporters like Susan Sarandon, Norton delivered a heartfelt opening speech, reminiscing on his early days as a college kid making his way up to the festival for the first time in 1989—“The year Do the Right Thing came out,” he noted, which earned applause from the hometown crowd.
"Without any equivocation, I can say this is a dream come true," he said of his closing night honor.
After thanking the producers and cast, Norton also thanked Michael Davidson, the late firefighter who died putting out a fire that broke out on the film’s set during production. “Michael Davidson has a wife and four children and he put his life on the line to take care of other people,” Norton said, getting slightly choked up. “That is a true New York hero.”
After the screening of the dramatic crime noir, which Norton directed, wrote, and starred in, guests made their way to Jazz at Lincoln Venter, where beautifully assembled stations piled with miniature beet burgers, grilled cheeses, tomato soup, pizza and pasta awaited in the first room. Campari cocktail stations flanked the far corners of the room, with a starry view of Columbus Circle twinkling in the background. In a larger second room, guests crowded Norton, the man of the hour, and Mbatha-Raw, who glided into the room in a tart green gown.
“He’s such a master,” Mbatha-Raw said of Norton to V.F. “I’ve admired his work as an actor for so many years.”
A little after 1 a.m., Norton took the stage to introduce “one of the musical druids of the world,” jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, who worked on Brooklyn and serves as the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Marsalis, a nine-time Grammy-winning and Pulitzer Prize-winning musician, took the stage with his band, launching right into two upbeat numbers. Mbatha-Raw danced along, martini in hand. The third and final song, which struck up at exactly 1:23 a.m., was soft and slow, a romantic ode that cast a spell over the room. Up on the second tier, Norton watched with his arms wrapped around his wife, Shauna Robertson, as they swayed to the beat, aglow from pink lights overhead.
