For Moving Pictures, I reviewed Tim Blake Nelson’s intelligently funny stoner movie Leaves of Grass.
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| Edward Norton, in perhaps his finest performance since “The Painted Veil” (2006), portrays radically different identical twin brothers Bill and Brady Kincaid. Bill, an accomplished Ivy League philosophy professor, abandoned the Oklahoma of his hippy mother and deceased bootlegger father for Heidegger and love-struck coeds. A small-time pot dealer who developed his own connoisseur strain, Brady lives with his pregnant girlfriend Colleen (Melanie Lynskey) in his small hometown about two hours outside of Tulsa. A family crisis forces Bill to leave the security of academia and confront the less-than-savory aspects of his youth. |
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| Nelson punctuates the humorous moments with wit and intelligence. The lascivious Anne (Lucy DeVito) reciting her own erotic poetry in Latin and a TV newscaster wondering what Hinduism had to do with a murder after faux skinheads tag a death scene with backward swastikas are but two of the abundant examples. |
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| By offering an insightful, humorous sneak into the seemingly dichotomous worlds of the intellectual elite and Okie rednecks, Nelson creates in “Leaves of Grass” both a love letter and a critical assessment of his obviously-beloved Tulsa and its less refined regional neighbors. |
