Leaves of Grass - Tim Blake Nelson

Leaves of Grass is a tremendously interesting film that is also tremendously frustrating. Written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson, who is better known for his work as a character actor, it takes a page from the Coen Brothers, whom Nelson thanks in the credits and for whom he co-starred in 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? Aiming to be a kind of Okie Fargo, it explores themes of nihilism and chaos the Coens’ also considered in their films No Country for Old Men (which I loved) and A Serious Man (which I hated), and the result is just as inconsistent for Nelson as it has been for the Coens.

Edward Norton stars in a dual role as Bill Kincaid, a successful New England philosophy professor, and his twin brother Brady, who grows and sells pot back home in Oklahoma. It’s a broad, showy, sometimes self-conscious performance, juggling wildly different personalities and accents, though ironically it’s in the role of the even-keeled academic where we catch him doing the most strenuous acting.

In the opening scene, Bill teaches a lecture about Socratic self-discipline that describes how he lives his life. But when we think we’ve achieved perfect harmony, he cautions, we have committed an act of hubris and are destined to fall. As foreshadowing goes, it’s a little on-the-nose, but what follows certainly can’t be faulted for predictability. It can be faulted for a good many other things, but more on those later.

Bill hasn’t been back to Oklahoma for twelve years, but is lured back by his brother under false pretenses. Brady needs a well-placed lookalike to provide him an alibi while he negotiates a dangerous deal in another town. The best part of the early reunion scenes is how well the film shows Brady’s equally formidable intelligence, not just in the sophisticated hydroponic grow house he designed himself, but in how subtly and effectively he coaxes Bill into doing things he doesn’t want to do. Both men have high IQs, but Brady has all the cunning.

Brady’s intelligence is on display in another good scene, where he eloquently explains his belief in God, and in doing so almost perfectly mirrors Bill’s philosophy. There are more good scenes like it, some of them involving Janet (Keri Russell), a local high school English teacher who can simultaneously quote Walt Whitman and gut a fish she wrestled with her bare hands. She’s introduced to be Bill’s love interest, and her purpose in the story is obvious and a bit trite — to match Bill’s intelligence and humble him with her down-to-earth wisdom — but she’s interesting and given good dialogue.

Tonal inconsistency dooms the film. Where Fargo successfully balanced its tragic and comic elements, Leaves of Grass careens wildly between them, switching abruptly from the absurdity of its yokel characters to a flash of sudden and graphic violence, and then back again. I think we’re supposed to regard the gruesome developments with detachment; these are not flesh-and-blood people but rather supporting evidence for Nelson’s thesis statement: that life, however strictly we try to bring order to it, will revert to chaos. But viewing the characters this way dehumanizes them, until what started as insight descends into misanthropy.

The film takes a severe misstep with a character named Ken Feinman (Josh Pais). We first meet him seated next to Bill on a plane to Oklahoma. He strikes up a conversation about his life, his dental practice, his family. The character seems to be a complete non-sequitur; he comes out of thin air and spends a disproportionate amount of time explaining things immaterial to the plot, which can only mean one thing: that he will become integral to the plot later on. How he reappears I won’t reveal, except to say that it involves coincidences that strain credulity and leads to a climax so senseless and overblown that the director’s intent is entirely lost on me.

Ken is Jewish, and the film makes a special point of his Jewishness for reasons I can’t discern. A sad-sack nebbish with low self-esteem, he could be a character from a Woody Allen film. There’s another character, the curiously named Pug Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfus), who talks about Russian pogroms and giving money to Israel before using a menorah as a weapon. Perhaps, like the Coens in A Serious Man, Nelson is musing about the presence of God in a cruel and unusual world. But the Coens didn’t find him, and neither does Nelson.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: