If I'm correct in reading IMDB, Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass should be playing this Friday at a theatre near you. I would recommend you go check it out; in addition to having the conceit of Edward Norton playing twin brothers - one a Professor of Philosophy and the other an awfully clever Pot Farmer - the film itself (which is also written by Nelson) takes a well worn genre and gives it some clever tweaks.
Norton plays Bill Kincaid, a Brown Professor of Philosophy who spent the better part of his life trying to disassociate himself from his mother Daisy (Susan Sarandon) and brother Brady (also Norton) and his background in Oklahoma. Despite some hiccups with a student making passes and writing suggestive love poems (in Latin), Bill is on track to have his own department at the Harvard Law School. That is, until he gets a call from Brady's friend Bolger (Tim Blake Nelson).
Brady's deep in debt to Pug Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfuss) for the cost of building his state-of-the-art hydroponic grow house, and in addition of Rothbaum's thugs hounding him for the money, he also has pressure from Jimmy and Buddy Fuller (Ken Cheesman and Steve Earle), whose dealing business he ran out of town. So Brady fakes his own death to trick Bill into coming back to Oklahoma. Brady thinks that if he can use Bill to convince people he's still in town, he can go to Tulsa and take care of Pug without consequences, then get back to being a husband and father to Colleen (Melanie Lynskey) and their unborn child.
Meanwhile, a rather confused Bill is talked into smoking up with Brady and meeting Janet (Keri Russell), a high school teacher and poet, as well as dealing with his hippie mother and coming to terms with the family he left behind.
Oh, I know. At a certain point, I was really worried that despite the philosophical backdrop and the great cast, I was just watching a variation on the "city person who left their family behind but then is drawn back in by the folksy good nature" movie. You know, the Sweet Home Alabama / Doc Hollywood kind of film. And while it is kind of that movie, Tim Blake Nelson has the good sense to take Brady's story in some unexpected directions, which Bill then has to deal with in very serious ways.
Leaves of Grass reminds me, in a lot of ways, of a much better version of Junebug. I like Junebug quite a bit, but Leaves of Grass is willing to go to darker places and constructs a better narrative, anchored by a really impressive dual role by Edward Norton. At no point did I not buy that Brady and Bill were different people. Yes, they both look like Edward Norton, and when Brady cuts his hair so that they kinda-sorta look alike, it's even clearer it's the same actor, but Bill Kincaid and Brady Kincaid are two very different people. Bill can only physically pass for Brady in the story, because Norton is that good at convincing you that they have lived different lives and that they do fundamentally see the world differently, even if they're both really intelligent about what they do.
Nelson doesn't re-invent the wheel with split screen technology here, and despite being cognitively aware of how the effects were being achieved, I still believed that two Edward Nortons were occupying the same space at times. There's a great shot involving a mirror with the two of them that really sells the physical proximity, even though it's technically impossible that Norton could be tapping himself on the shoulder.
Anyway, I don't mean to get bogged down on the technical stuff. The story keeps you going through the predictable beats and then heads down less worn roads, and the cast is all uniformly great. There are a handful of characters and plot points I'm not mentioning just to preserve some sense of discovery, but I think you'll find Leaves of Grass to be a movie worth visiting. And yes, Walt Whitman figures into the story, as though I needed to tell you that.
No comments:
Post a Comment