Tim Blake Nelson’s Leaves of Grass is some kind of wonder. It has Edward Norton playing Brady and Bill Kincaid, twins from Oklahoma. Bill is a rising academic superstar, a professor of philosophy at Brown who has been offered to establish his own department at Harvard. Brady grows pot back home in Little Dixie, Oklahoma. And not just any pot: Brady’s pot is so good, he is pressured by all sides to expand his business and keep going. But his girlfriend is pregnant and he want’s to give up professional pot production in order to become a real dad, the kind of dad he and Bill never had. His plot to untangle himself from this web involves luring Bill back home. And then I shouldn’t say anymore, except to say that this movie feels different right from the beginning.
The title refers, of course, to Walt Whitman, that eminent American poet largely unread by me. The opening scene involves Bill giving a lecture on Socrates and the concept of passion. How when we think we understand our lives and think we have achieved the desired balance, we “pretend divinity, and will crash, like Ikaros, flaming into the sea.” Balance versus chaos. Bill the Academic and Brady the Hick. Both brothers are extremely intelligent, and there is an interesting exchange in which Brady confesses to Bill that he has read and understood all his printed papers and articles. His only complaint: the language. He can’t understand the necessity of words like epistemology and polemic, and when Brady tells Bill that he is tired of all Bill’s articles being critiques or reviews of stuff other people have written about what some third person thought about etc., we kinda get his point. Bill’s reply: “the humanities haven’t changed all that much.” To the people of Little Dixie, Bill is a thinker. Not an academic, just someone who has opinions beyond their understanding, and the movie lovingly portrays this as both a good and a bad thing.
Back to the title. Bill meets a local English teacher, a young woman who in her spare time writes poetry. She praises poetry for being without rules; Bill rejects the importance of poetry because it has no rules. He draws on his dear, old philosophers; she draws on Walt Whitman, gently explaining to him that Whitman’s free verse represents “pure, unashamed passion, without definable restrictions,” because in poetry you make your own rules. Bill asks: then how do you know what’s true? what to rely on? Answer: “once you think you’ve got it all solved, what’s left?” The most interesting opinion comes through Brady. He compares God and perfection to the impossible concept of parallel lines. We know how it works, and that it must work, but since we can never prove it we can never be sure. Brady’s subtle suggestion early in the movie of the redundancy of the Humanities is made obsolete by the movie as a whole. The way the movie and its characters invite and encourage debate and discussion is exactly what the Humanities are about. More than anything, Leaves of Grass feels true. Look for it, though, it may crawl under the radar here in Denmark.
From fiction to non-fiction, The National has a three-in-one review up for the latest efforts by Dave Eggers (Zeitoun), Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals) and Michael Chabon (Manhood for Amateurs).
On the future of printed books, Steve Wasserman at thruthdig.
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