Leaves of Grass

There we were in our usual place, in front of the TV surfing for something to watch after dinner.  I wasn’t in the mood to watch any news on any station (all the news is bad these days).  Deadliest Catch is done for the season.  True Blood isn’t on until Sunday [yeah, it’s a guilty pleasure].   None of the baseball games interested me.  Then I found a movie in progress on Showtime called Leaves of Grass.  I saw it had Edward Norton so I stopped surfing.  Ever since I saw him in Primal Fear and American History X I’ve been a fan, so I left the TV on that station.  Tim Blake Nelson [the guy in O Brother Where Art Thou who said “we thought you was a toad”] wrote and directed the movie, and he has a supporting part.  It's a down-home kind of story set in Oklahoma about two brothers and their family.

Edward Norton plays the two brothers.  The first is Bill Kincaid, a professor of classics at Brown University.  He’s an accomplished guy – he has a reputation as a true scholar who is dedicated to his work of philosophical exploration.  He’s a published author and is about to get offered his own department at Harvard.  He wanted to get as far away from Oklahoma as he could, and worked very hard at losing his Southern accent.  His twin brother Brady is a stoner who grows some wicked good weed.  As one would expect of a guy in his profession, Brady is in trouble with others who are in his line of work, but mainly his chief customer, drug kingpin Pug Rothbaum [Richard Dreyfus].  One day while visiting his drug-addled mother [Susan Sarandon] in a rest home, she asks Brady if Bill will ever come back to see them.  Brady replies that it’ll probably take either him or his mom dying to make that happen [foreshadowing!].

Bill gets a phone call telling him his brother was killed by an errant crossbow.  So Bill hops on a plane to Tulsa.  While en route he has a conversation with a Jewish orthodontist who is relocating to Oklahoma to start an orthodontist practice.  He’s met at the airport by Brady’s partner-in-crime and best friend, Bolger [Tim Blake Nelson].  On the way back to Brady’s house they stop at a local convenience store, where they’re met by some of the area’s other drug dealers who mistake Bill for Brady.  A fight ensues, Bill gets the crap kicked out of him and gets knocked out.  When he comes to, there’s Brady to greet him.  Bill realizes he’s been had.  The reason Brady wanted to get Bill back to Oklahoma was to use him in a scheme to get out of all of his debts so he can marry his pregnant girlfriend [Melanie Lynskey].  What is very fun to watch is how these two brothers interact with each other – the learned scholar and the pot head.  Norton does such a great job playing both characters it’s easy to forget he’s the same guy.

Brady is every bit as smart as Bill [their mom implies he’s even smarter than Bill], but he chose to remain in Oklahoma.  Each is extremely articulate in his own way.  As Bill expresses his disdain for Brady’s chosen “career path,” he can’t help but be impressed by Brady’s hydroponic system for marijuana cultivation.  Brady, on the other hand, tells Bill that he reads everything Bill publishes, even though he has to use the “fuckin’ OED” to get through them all.  Meanwhile, while Bill is in town for the Brady funeral that doesn’t happen, he meets a pretty English teacher [Keri Russell] who likes to quote Walt Whitman [hence the Leaves of Grass title] and fish for catfish by hand.

After the characters are fleshed out, the movie gets to Brady’s last big caper, which doesn’t end well.  There are some weird twists along the way to keep you interested.  The dialog amongst all the characters is priceless.  As the movie progresses you find that you can’t walk away from it for fear of missing something witty.  The script doesn’t insult your intelligence.  It’s like watching a Coen Brothers movie.  Just when I thought American filmmakers had run out ideas, Tim Blake Nelson proved me wrong.  This is definitely not your average Hollywood fare.  It’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel, and it’s not an American adaptation of a foreign film.  Despite the use of a tried-and-true concept [twins who are polar opposites], it’s an original film that’s well-acted and fairly well-written.  I loved it!