It sounds terrific.
Title: Leaves of Grass.
Plot, via Roger Ebert:
… It is certainly the most intelligent, philosophical and poetic film I can imagine that involves five murders in the marijuana-dealing community of Oklahoma and includes John Prine singing “Illegal Smile.”
… Sometimes you cannot believe your luck as a movie unfolds. There is a mind behind it, joyful invention, obvious ambition. As is often the case, I had studiously avoiding reading anything at all about “Leaves of Grass” before going to see the movie, although I rather doubted it would be about Walt Whitman.
… The film opens with [Edward] Norton as a philosopher named Bill Kincaid giving a lecture on Socrates to a packed classroom of star-struck students at Brown. It’s a measure of Nelson’s writing and Norton’s acting that this lecture isn’t a sound bite but is allowed to continue until the professor develops his point, and it’s an interesting one. Only as I think back do I realize what an audacious way that is to open a movie about the drug culture of rural Oklahoma.
Spoilers in this paragraph. Kinkaid is on the fast track. He’s published books, is a crossover intellectual superstar, is offered a chance to open his own department at Harvard. Then he gets a telephone call telling him his twin brother Brady is dead. He has long since severed his old family ties, but flies home for the funeral to Little Dixie, Oklahoma, and is met at the airport by his twin’s best friend. As it turns out, Brady is not dead, and the story was a lie designed to lure him back home for two purposes. One is to force him to see his mother, a 1960s pothead played by Susan Sarandon. The other is to act as his double to establish an alibi while Brady goes up to Tulsa for a meeting with the region’s dominant marijuana dealer Tug Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfuss).
… [T]he film makes the twins equally brilliant; Brady has designed and built a hydroponic farm that is producing its seventh generation of top-quality weed. He is also something of a philosopher himself. In writing his dialogue, [the director] doesn’t condescend. He is a Tulsa native who dismisses the widespread notion that a man’s “hick” accent (the movie’s word) provides a measure of his intelligence. Brady sounds like a semi-literate redneck, but he’s very smart.
… Janet (Keri Russell) [is] a local English teacher and poet, who quotes Whitman to Billy and entrances him in a way he has never before allowed…
The Sarandon character is right out of Michel Houellebecq.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:08PM
WOW.
Color me intrigued. And impatient, now, to see it on the screen.
Great cast! Edward Norton can do no wrong.
Thanks for sharing this — can’t wait to check out the video clips on Ebert’s blog!
September 17th, 2009 at 9:18PM
You’re welcome – I don’t think there’s an official trailer yet — plus I don’t think the film has distribution yet in the States, etc. So seeing it might be a bit of a challenge…
September 18th, 2009 at 6:23AM
I read Houellebecq’s The Platform this summer…couldn’t decide if his writing was not all that interesting or the bits about double-penetration, etc, were just too far. I felt, for the first time, like a prude.
[As i write that i am curious that language has the power to do that–which is why i continue to read, right?–and says that at least novels can still move people.]
September 18th, 2009 at 9:30AM
jeff: I don’t even remember the double-penetration bits. I guess this makes me… whatever the polar opposite of a prude is.
… OR… Did I repress them?
September 18th, 2009 at 12:09PM
Better ask your shrink. 😉
September 18th, 2009 at 2:36PM
My shrink… hm… where’d he get to?