Leaves of Grass (2009)

This movie is a wonderful portrayal of where you come from and where you can go, what you can escape and what you cannot. It is also a good twin/bad twin story that has all the appeal that those tales have--but this is much more about who your family is, and just how much of that can you escape.
Edward Norton masterfully plays both brothers: Brady, a scruffy grower of prime pot in Oklahoma, and Bill, who has repudiated those Oklahoma roots, shed his accent, and become an internationally renowned professor of the classics at Brown University. Harvard is wooing him kind of famous. They both have excelled, but they have chosen vastly different playing fields.
Bill has avoided his hometown and his family like the plague. He has openly talked about not coming back, escaping and not looking back. Which is always a psychological clue of unresolved issues lurking beneath the surface. However, when he thinks his brother has been murdered, he re- turns to Oklahoma, and for a while the plot unfolds into where he came from and each brother goshing the other about their choices in life. THe brothers do love each other, even though they have chosen vastly different paths. Brady has himself in quite a dilemma and the only way out he can see is one that he and Bill have played since childhood. Which says a lot about sibling relationships, who you rely on when the going gets tough, and how problems solving doesn't always become more complex as you grow up. So it is charming and funny. For awhile. Then suddenly we go from 'gee shucks' banter into territory that looks remarably like “Deliverance”.
The screen writer, Tim Blake Nelson (who also plays Brady’s sidekick in the pot-growing business) has a several other twists in the tale, and the result is a film that keeps you deviously and pleasurably off-balance: it’s funny and unnerving at the same time.
Mr. Norton is (as always) a pleasure to watch, and so is the rest of the cast. You know you’re in for a treat when your minor roles are played by Susan Sarandon (the twins’ off-kilter mother) and Richard Dreyfuss (a Jewish drug lord who calls in the debt Brady owes him). Keri Russell is engaging as the poet who can noodle a hundred pound catfish and who captures Bill's attention.
When all is said and done, this is not a 'happily ever after' tale, but for the most part the bad things happen to people who have largely brought them on themselves. It is not for youngsters, but it is an entertaining Saturday night movie.