Leaves of Grass

It's rare for the following two things to coincide: One, a small-time actor, writer & director scripting a story with two leading characters, to be played by a specific, prolific actor, whose refusal would have resulted in the script itself being scrapped; and Two, the actor himself willing to be so desperately keen to act in the movie that he forgoes half his pay to simply bag the part. Leaves of Grass might seem like a feeble attempt at bridging a gap between the Coen brothers and well..(Pineapple Express??) Tim Blake Nelson might be more memorable as the somewhat dazed Delmar character from O Brother, Where Art Thou? But here he is with a script, a production budget and even proving he can direct a movie himself. I'm not familiar with his Grey Zone and Eye of God, but if he could write a complicated script with such ease, I'm certainly lauding him for them too..
And there's Edward Norton, the man who would never agree to appear in a film he didn't believe he had reason to respect, playing two opposite roles now with a subtle, yet b/w contrast.
From the opening scene to the close, we see worked out in the transformation of young and admired Brown University Classics Professor, Bill Kincaid (Norton), that regardless of any improvement we may think we have made in our lives or our selves, we never really leave our childhood homes and family, for we carry it and them with us, and we should, as we try to somehow balance the past with the future, the rational and intellectual with the emotional and experiential, control with unbridled exuberance.
While the script is one of ideas, the movie is realized by a great cast, full of humanity and warmth and life. We learn, for example, from Bill's high tech state of the art hydroponic agrologist-gone-haywire pot growing identical twin brother, Brady (also Norton), the relationship between God and parallel lines. Brady, with a false message of his own death, tricks brother Bill, who has eschewed and remains estranged from his family, into returning home to the small town of Idabel in southeast Oklahoma (closer to Hope and El Dorado than Tulsa) to help with Brady's scheme to negotiate a loan extension with the state's drug kingpin from Tulsa, the otherwise respectable oilfield equipment purveyor and Jewish philanthropist, Pug (delightfully and fiercelyplayed by Richard Dreyfuss). After being fetched at the airport by Bolger (Tim Blake Neslon), Brady's best friend, partner in crime, and all around Sancho Panza, Bolger takes Bill to the rival drug gang's headquarters, to test whether they will mistake Bill for Brady. They do, and Bill is pummeled to senselessness, only to wake up at Brady's home, discovering that Brady is alive and wants him becoming a participant in a scheme for an alibi if the drug loan renegotiation, as he thinks it will,turns bad.
Bill is unwilling, at least until the persuasive Brady charms him into a monster bong hit of the 7th generation Uber-potent bud being cultivated by Brady and Bolger. As Bill the professor is "annihilated" in a puff of smoke, Bill the brother begins to become reborn, relearning from Brady what he has forgotten, a passion for life, in all of its quirky, messy, deadly serious, loving, and improbable guises. As Brady's plan unfolds, Bill is bound ever closer in the scheme, and to the family and place he thought he could do without in his quest for success and control over his life. Charmed by local teacher and poet, Janet (played with equal parts innocent charm, brutally competent knife-wielding non-chalance, and subtlety by Kerri Russell), Bill learns from her the ancient art of noodling for monster catfish and is reminded by her recitations of, and commentary about, Whitman's free verse, and her own, that not all that is beautiful and majestic follows classical rules of form and expectation. And love, that terrible beauty, is born. In reuniting with his mother, a pot-smoking ex-flower child fed up with the world, who has checked herself into a nursing home so that she "can do as she pleases" (played by the ever beguiling and compelling Susan Sarandon), Bill learns of the patience, depth, frustration,and courage of love that lets go and trusts. And when Bill seeks forgiveness and understanding for a terrible wrong by his brother from Pug's rabbi (rivetingly played by Maggie Siff), he learns that atonement is only approached, but perhaps never achieved, by the hard work of righting what is wrong.
The comedy, as mentioned, is pitch black and the sudden switch from laughs to gasps happens in a blink of an eye, honestly you won't see what's coming before your left open jawed at the outcome. Its this kind of storytelling that keeps viewers riveted, you just don't know what's coming and that I feel is the secret to a really good film.
This is a solid debut from Blake Nelson, albeit held together by Norton, so it's going to be interesting to see what he does next.

Fight Club

Undeniably one of the best films of the tremendous cinematic year that was 1999, David Fincher's Fight Club is a cultural landmark. Chuck Palahniuk's acerbic first novel (and still the best the 5 of his books that I've read) is visualized with Fincher's stylistic creativity and the result is a modern classic.

Edward Norton plays a white collar stiff, whose life is so nondescript that he is known only as The Narrator. He acknowledges that he is mired in shallow consumerism; a slave to the "IKEA nesting instinct." He is also an insomniac and can only find catharsis and sleep after sitting in on 12-step program meetings for dying people. This strategy fails, however, when Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) pulls the same stunt and ruins the reality that he has found. After an explosion that destroys the narrator's apartment, he moves in with soap salesmen and revolutionary Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Together, they start an underground society in which men reject civilization and unleash their primal urges upon each other.

Fight Club is often described as anti-consumerism or anti-establishment. There are, however, two less talked about ideas that I take away from it. The first is the conflict between biology and society. Sitting on a bus, the protagonists see a rather gaudy advertisement for Gucci underwear. Durden asks derisively, "Is that what a man looks like?" I would argue that it is the insidious nature of the consumer culture, that it actually emasculates men by tapping into their male drives. It is the natural role of the male to be the hunter/gatherer, so buying things has become the modern incarnation of this. Another example of this interplay occurs when the narrator described how his father would leave his family to start a new one every six years. "Setting up franchises," says Durden. Interestingly, the behavior described here does approximate the behavior of human males, pre-civilization. The short average duration of modern marriages suggests the hard-wired nature of this behavior. The fight club, however, is an outright rejection of modern society, in which men revel in short bouts of non-lethal violence, perhaps as they were meant to. When these urges are bottled up, it may not be too much of a stretch to suggest that the result can be wars and genocide.

There are also, I believe, religious implications to the fight club and to Project Mayhem. Tyler Durden's philosophy seems to be part anarchism and part determinism, behaviorism and materialism (in the metaphysical sense; certainly not in the consumerist sense). He is about three parts B.F. Skinner and one part Henry David Thoreau. It is those facets of Skinner-type philosophy that are of the most interest to me and that Durden espouses most fervently. Like any good materialist, he utterly rejects the notion that human beings have any special worth. He extols to his followers: "You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else... We are all part of the same compost heap." Yet ironically, in supposedly freeing his followers from consumerism, he makes them slaves to his own purposes. They are shaved to become like the oft-mentioned sacrificial "space monkeys." They are removed of their names (this has a very anti-Christian feel to, since the having of and giving of names by humans is considered an important gift from God among the most meticulous followers of that religion). "Sooner or later we all became what Tyler wanted us to be," says the narrator. Durden also expropriates the idea of 'hitting bottom' as the beginning of salvation (the 12-step program is a fundamentally religious construct), further casting him as a sort of Anti-Christian. B.F. Skinner suggested that understanding the science of human behavior was the key to controlling that behavior benevolently. Similarly, Durden exerts control over his followers for what he believes are good ends. Whatever the merits of those ends, there is no doubt that Tyler, in some ways, becomes very much like the corporate fascists he despises.

Finally, Fight Club is a definitively 'male' movie. This is neither good nor bad, but it is undeniable. The character of Marla is entertaining, but almost entirely defined by her relationship to the two male protagonists. The picture would have almost worked without her. The idea of castration is presented as a deeply held male fear and is used skillfully throughout the movie. If we can take one thing away from this film, it would be the danger of denying the difference in biology between males and females. Males have a need for some level of violence and it is important that we have acceptable outlets for it. Conversely, it is interesting to take note of some of the ways in which society attempts to homogenize the sexes. Take the idea of "paternity leave" for new fathers - it's great in theory and it should certainly be an option, but I can almost guarantee that it will never become the norm, because it is a practice that is just so contrary to our deeply ingrained biological drives. To deny this is the height of naivety and will do no one any good.

Overall, Fight Club makes my top 10 list for superb acting (especially by Norton, the best American actor of his generation), great humor and satire and its excellent script, thanks largely to the excellent source material. To conclude, I'll quote the deterministic, yet strangely comforting words of Chuck Palahniuk, from near the end of Fight Club (the book): "We are not special. We are not crap or trash either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens."