The myth of the modern sophisticate is given a thorough workout in Tim Blake Nelson’s “Leaves Of Grass,” a rowdy, dysfunctional new picture opening in New York this weekend. Lead character Bill Kincaid, an arch philosophy professor with high aspirations but low tolerance for his own roots, is the rube in a classical movie set-up, at once the fool and the smartest person in the room. As played by Edward Norton, an actor of great intelligence, the professor spends nearly every scene from the 30-minute point flummoxed, stupefied by the chain of events resulting from the deceptions of a supposed “lesser” brother.
“Leaves of Grass” is interesting, funny and fertile enough that you won’t regard this as a gimmick, as the brother is also played by Norton. Unlike his chatty, button-down sibling, Brady has used his apparent hereditary cognitive skills to pursue a life of crime. Specifically, Brady is a slave to the sticky icky, carefully cultivating crops using advanced hydroponics in order to build a muscular distribution system that stretches through the south. The superficial joke is that in the arena of knowledge, Brady’s worshipful stance on his bountiful buds places him a rung above his brother’s highfalutin’ book-learnin’. The most human decision made by the film is that director Nelson refuses to have these schools of thought compete, existing on the same level of respect.
Bill, who has pretended his family no longer exists, quickly boards a plane when he receives a phone call suggesting Brady has passed on. Unfortunately, it’s a ruse designed to allow Brady to be at two places at once, both visiting his elderly mother and executing a hit on a competing drug lord with designs on controlling the local trade. This drug lord is a Hasidic played by Richard Dreyfuss, and like most of the characters populating “Leaves of Grass,” he’s, at first glance, a caricature. However, once the character is allowed to expound on his philosophies, which involve his seedy businesses representing reparations for crimes against the Jewish, it becomes apparent that “Leaves of Grass” is going to allow each character the same level of humanity.
Blake Nelson is a director who has made films that never represent their surface subject matter. “The Grey Zone,” a Holocaust drama, managed to represent a more intimate, human experience divorced from typical History Channel grandstanding of the genre. And “O,” his much-maligned high school version of “Othello,” was a dark and literate story about interracial relationships and the ugliness of competitive high school sports. Within “Leaves of Grass,” he’s exploring two separate tropes: on one side, there’s the Twin Movie, where two lookalikes with very different skill sets have to work together to deceive a common enemy. And then there’s the Pot Movie, where the film willingly obscures the narrative to kowtow: to mood-altering sequences, to moments where characters become dupes to a haze of confusion, and to a generally herky-jerky slowed pace.
“Leaves of Grass” is cinema-literate to both embrace these concepts and exploit them for a truly different aim. The twin shenanigans strain credulity almost automatically, as neither seem anything like each other – credit to Norton’s hyper-verbal, relaxed dual performance creating two entirely different characterizations. And the pot elements of the film aren’t given short-shrift either, as marijuana is fetishised by Brady, but seen as any other plant within the narrative. Bill in particular isn’t one to turn down a blunt, but the film doesn’t turn him into a raging pothead or a nattering prude, refusing to pass judgment on his flavorful intake.
With a set of amusing diversions, including Bill’s refreshingly mature flirtation with a local poet and the overzealousness of a wayward dentist, “Leaves of Grass” weaves together a number of comic and seriocomic subplots. With its fascination of karma, drugs, philosophy and Jewish history, “Grass” has been compared to a Coen brothers film. The Coens, however, create a rich tapestry of storylines that come together like a crisp symphony. Nelson’s freewheeling “Grass,” which goes in a number of surprising directions, feels more accurately like a noodly jazz solo, hitting unexpectedly diverse notes with stark clarity and playfulness. It’s a difficult tune to resist. [A-]