Leaves of Grass

I like Edward Norton as an actor, but I haven't really noticed him in movies over the past few years.  Looking at his filmography, I have to go back to 2003's The Italian Job for a movie of his that I actually liked, and he's not even very good in it.  I stumbled across Leaves of Grass more or less by accident, and the cover gave me pause; Edward Norton was pulling an Eddie Murphy and acting against himself in a comedy?  Okay, I'm intrigued.

Sadly, neither of these men are Tyler Durden.

In case you are wondering, this movie takes its title from a book of poems by Walt Whitman.  Whitman published the collection when he was thirty-six, but he continued to revise and edit it until he died at age seventy-one.  While that history doesn't really have much to do with the movie (or does it?), I've always found that interesting.

OCP: obsessive-compulsive poet

The film focuses on the Kincaid brothers, Bill (Edward Norton) and Brady (Edward Norton).  Bill is a quiet professor of classical philosophy, who spends his time critiquing the critiques other professors have made about classical philosophers.  Brady is a redneck drug dealer with enough scientific smarts to design and build his own state-of-the-art hydroponic marijuana warehouse.  Brady finds himself in a bit of a pickle when the local drug kingpin, Pug (Richard Dreyfuss), starts to breathe down his neck; Pug put up the money for the pot lab and wants either his investment repaid or for Brady to start dealing hard drugs.  Brady and his dim-witted friend, Bolger (Tim Blake Nelson, who also directed the movie), come up with a plan, but it requires Bill to come home for a visit.  That's a problem, because Bill hasn't returned --- or even returned phone calls or letters --- since he left to go to college.  How would you get your estranged twin brother to return home after twenty-odd years?  If your answer was "fake your own crossbow-related death," then this movie might not have any surprises for you.  Once he's home in the deep South (which is in Oklahoma?) again, Bill faces his fears and reevaluates his life, and gets entangled in his brother's shenanigans.

One of the difficult choices filmmakers are forced to make when making a comedy is how silly to make it.  Do you go insultingly broad, like the Wayans, or do you go for the 1% chance of a cult hit, like in Napoleon Dynamite?  Or **ugh** do you go just go for predictable stupidity in a romantic comedy?  Writer/director Tim Blake Nelson opts to go the most difficult route, that of the black comedy.  I love black comedies in theory; the idea of cracking jokes at inappropriate times appeals to my inner asshole.  Unfortunately, I don't think Nelson truly succeeds in this attempt.  There are some funny moments and lines of dialogue (I can think of two that involve crossbows), but the humor level is pretty low, unless you count references to pot smoking as knee-slappers.  As a drama, Leaves of Grass doesn't really come together, either.  I thought Nelson directed the funeral scene at the end well enough, but the rest was pretty emotion-free.

On the other hand, I thought the acting was pretty decent.  Edward Norton did a fine job in both roles, but I didn't ever really care for either one.  It was momentarily amusing to see Norton as a redneck, but that novelty wore off quickly.  Neither brother was particularly interesting, either, which made this movie harder to watch.  I enjoyed Tim Blake Nelson as Norton's sidekick; no one can play a well-meaning idiot better than Nelson.  Keri Russell pops up to play a poetry-spouting, catfish-punching local, and she's decent enough.  It was interesting to see Richard Dreyfuss as a villain, and his rant about drug dealers being anti-Semitic was...unusual, I guess.  Susan Sarandon played the mentally fragile mother of the brothers, Melanie Lynskey pretended that she was pregnant, and musician Steve Earle looked really, really ugly.  Nobody gave a bad performance, but many of the characters were unmemorable or just dull.

Which came first, the accent or the facial hair?

I can't say that I enjoyed this movie as either a drama or a comedy, but it has some redeeming value.  The story wasn't confusing and a few of the jokes were funny.  I think the best thing about this movie is that it doesn't assume that people with thick Southern accents are stupid.  As Brady, Edward Norton has a few interesting and intelligent things to say, even if he is saying them with a mullet.  Unfortunately, the script is not strong enough to make the occasional funny bits into a cohesive or interesting whole, despite a solid cast.  I think the biggest problem with the movie is that it doesn't embrace or take advantage of Norton in his dual roles.  You don't make a movie with an actor playing multiple parts unless you're making at least one of those characters into a joke; failing that, you go the Adaptation route and make a genuinely weird movie.  Leaves of Grass does neither, opting for pretty conventional characters, even if they are rednecks.  When I prepared to watch this movie, my only hope was that it would be better than Norton's last dark comedy, Death to Smoochy.  This movie doesn't have the highs and lows of that film, but it disappoints, just the same.

Peacock

When I saw the cover to Peacock, I assumed that this was going to be some sort of drama between the three actors on the cover (Ellen Page, Susan Sarandon, and Cillian Murphy).  It sounds like a reasonable premise, especially with the tag line of "If only he knew what she was doing."  Since this was released direct-to-DVD, it hasn't gotten much buzz; in other words, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

The first scene shows a 1950s American housewife doing chores --- pinning up laundry in the back yard, cleaning, cooking, etc. --- and then going upstairs to her bedroom.  On the bed is a neatly folded pile of men's clothing.  She pauses for a moment, takes off her wig, and you realize that you've been watching Cillian Murphy dressed as a woman for the past couple of minutes.  Well, I figured it out a little ahead of time, but if you weren't familiar with Murphy, that scene would have been quite a shock.  Before I go on, I have to point out that this is not exactly a movie about cross-dressing.  I mention that because, more often than not, cross-dressing in movies and television is used for cheap laughs.

There's nothing wrong with that, but I just wanted to make it clear that this isn't cross-dressing for comedy.  Murphy's character is also not pulling a Buffalo Bill in this movie and using cross-dressing in a horror film context.  This is something different.

Every morning, John (Cillian Murphy) wakes up and dresses himself up as Emma.  Emma takes care of John, doing the housework, cooking, and leaving him notes and instructions on what to do while she's "sleeping."  When it is time, Emma goes upstairs, changes into John's clothes, and he seems delighted to find breakfast with a good luck note by his plate.  Obviously, John has some sort of dissociative identity disorder, because the two personalities seem oblivious to each other.  John goes about his day as a painfully shy and socially awkward bank worker, comes home, and repeats the routine again in the morning.  No one knows about Emma.

One morning, while putting up the laundry to dry, Emma is knocked unconscious when a train car is derailed and tears through the back yard.  The accident brings neighbors running, and they find a loose caboose in the yard with a woman that no one in the small town has ever met before.  Emma excuses herself as quickly as she can, goes inside and changes into John, but the damage is done.  The townsfolk want to see and speak with the woman who narrowly avoided a tragic death; Fanny (Susan Sarandon) wants to get Emma involved in the local women's shelter; the incumbent mayor (Keith Carradine) wants to hold a rally in their back yard and have pictures taken with both John and his lovely wife, Emma; Maggie (Ellen Page), a struggling young mother, is forced to ask John for financial aid, but is willing to accept Emma's care and advice.  From the moment that train jumps the rails, John's carefully designed insular life begins to unravel.

This is Cillian Murphy's movie from start to finish.  The supporting actors are good; there really isn't a bad performance in the bunch.  Susan Sarandon is fine as a do-gooding socialite, Ellen Page showed some depth in a tough role, and even the typically mediocre Bill Pullman was fine.  I was pleasantly surprised by Josh Lucas' understated performance as the closest thing John has to a friend, too.  The supporting cast is just window dressing on this movie, though.  This is all about Murphy's performance.  I was very impressed with the way he channeled two distinct characters; changing his voice and appearance are no-brainers, but Murphy was able to give each character its own physicality, and that is where his performance impresses the most.  He's certainly not a pretty woman, but I thought he was pretty convincing, and that is a huge step toward making this film work.

Still prettier than Fergie.

This is director and co-writer Michael Lander's first feature-length film, and it definitely shows off a particular strength.  While it certainly helps that a noteworthy cast (two cast members from Inception, for starters) signed on to a movie written and directed by an unproved talent, Lander obviously had pretty clear ideas about what he wanted to do with this film.  The set and the props in scenes were arranged with particular purposes in mind, and they all paid off.  Lander also did a good job with the cast, guiding them toward very sympathetic performances (except Pullman, who was supposed to be mean).

I was less impressed with Lander's story.  By showing that John and Emma were different personalities from the same mind within the first few minutes of the film, it eliminated the main surprise of this story.  From that point forward, the movie focuses on the battle between the personas to see which will emerge victorious; this is a very gradual process, but the slow pace might have worked if there was an appropriate climax.  There isn't.  Sure, we see how far the personalities are willing to go to defeat the other into submission, but it is nowhere near as disturbing as the movie is building it up to be.

This had a lot of promising elements that could have come together to make a rather disturbing psychological drama/horror flick.  Brian Reitzell's score did a great job conveying the conflict within John's body and was occasionally very creepy.  The performances were solid all around, with Cillian Murphy giving a particularly impressive performance.  Unfortunately, something is missing.  Maybe it is the lack of a satisfying conclusion.  Maybe it's the fact that none of these characters are particularly interesting (aside from a case of multiple personalities), or maybe it's because none of the townspeople immediately realize that Emma is a dude.  Everything in this movie is so serious, so sad, so...drab.  There is no joy in this film to balance that out, and the lack of a chilling or horrifying conclusion multiplies that drab feeling.  It's not a bad idea, and I feel bad that Murphy wasted a lot of good work here, but the movie doesn't live up to the sum of its parts.

As a quick final note, I know I criticize this movie for not being horrific enough, and some people might disagree with that statement.  SPOILER ALERT: I don't care if a drifter gets killed in this movie.  Drifters are just fodder for serial killers in movies, and you knew from the moment he appeared on screen that something bad would happen to him.  That's what he gets for talking to strangers.