Films: Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass

USA, 2009, 105 Minute Running Time
Genre/Subjects: Comedy, Crime, Family Issues, Romance, Substance Abuse, Thriller
Program: Contemporary World Cinema
Language: English

DIRECTOR: Tim Blake Nelson
Producer: Tim Blake Nelson, Elie Cohn, Kristina Dubin, John Langley, Bill Migliore, Edward Norton
Editor: Michelle Botticelli
Screenwriter: Tim Blake Nelson
Cinematographer: Roberto Schaefer
Principal Cast: Edward Norton, Susan Sarandon, Keri Russell, Melanie Lynskey, Ty Burrell, Richard Dreyfuss

Edward Norton plays twin brothers in this comedic thriller set in rural Oklahoma. As Bill Kincaid, he’s an Ivy League professor of philosophy who has gotten about as far away, in every sense, as he can from his aging hippie of a mother (Susan Sarandon) and unstable brother Brady back home. On the tenure track to academic glory, he’s admired widely and being ardently courted by Harvard. When he hears that Brady has been murdered, he reluctantly interrupts his work to return to Oklahoma for the burial – only to discover that his loony, dangerous, and equally brilliant doppelgänger is very much alive and has lured him there for nefarious purposes. 

Redneck Brady Kincaid is a master of hydroponic pot cultivation with big ambitions and a big problem with the local drug lord (Richard Dreyfuss) – which he just needs a little help from his brother to solve. Despite his growing attraction to Janet, an English teacher and poet played by Keri Russell, Bill has no intention of sticking around – but when he is implicated in a murder, he has no choice. For all his high-powered intellect and the distance he has tried to maintain from his family, he is trapped by violent circumstances that begin to scramble his carefully ordered existence.

Norton – who also did a double-identity turn in Primal Fear (for which he received his first Oscar nomination) – makes the contrast between the scholar and the druggie so fluid and vivid that it is easy to forget he is playing them both. Tulsa-born writer/director Tim Blake Nelson (The Grey Zone, SDFF 25), who also plays Brady’s best friend, wrote Leaves of Grass with Norton in mind. At the time, Norton says, he was taking a break – but when he read the script, he knew it was exactly what he wanted to do next.

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