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| Edward Norton in Leaves of Grass |
Cast: Edward Norton, Tim Blake Nelson, Keri Russell, Melanie Lynskey, Josh Pais, Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss, Pruitt Taylor Vince. Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson. Cinematography: Roberto Schaefer. Production design: Max Biscoe. Film editing: Michelle Botticelli. Music: Jeff Danna.
With a fine cast headed by Edward Norton in a tour de force performance, Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass only needed a somewhat less ramshackle screenplay than the one Nelson wrote for it. The premise is sound: A successful academic returns to his backwater home town and is confronted with his messed-up family. Norton deftly creates the disparate twin brothers, philosophy professor Bill Kincaid and good-ol'-boy marijuana grower Brady Kincaid. Bill soon finds himself embroiled in Brady's illegal affairs. Nelson's screenplay does a lot of things right, using Bill's philosophical approach to life as a foil to Brady's hang-loose lifestyle, and making both characters somewhat plausible twins. It also does a lot of predictable things, like finding a romantic interest for Bill in a poetry-quoting local played nicely by Keri Russell. But he overcomplicates his story with secondary characters like the randy coed who snares Bill into a sexual harassment charge or the orthodontist who meets Bill on a plane and unwittingly precipitates the bloody outcome of the story. He also casts great actors like Susan Sarandon and Melanie Lynskey in roles that have little to do with the mainstream of the plot. Leaves of Grass uneasily straddles the line between screwball and black comedy, but even when it doesn't work, the cast makes it watchable.
