Leaves of Grass” opens on a black screen. The only action is the voice of Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton, “Stone”), a professor of classical philosophy at Brown University. Suddenly, the picture comes into focus and the audience is sitting in his lecture, eyes wandering the classroom, listening to Bill explain Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and Alcibiades. It is only through immense personal struggle, Bill explains, that we can control our most base impulses. Yet Plato allows Alcibiades – who is plagued by those impulses – the last word. In Bill’s reading, this is tantamount to an admission on Plato’s end that passion and impulse are essentially and unavoidably human qualities.
That lecture is a framing device for Bill’s personality. He has defined a set of rules to live by and lets those rules control both his work and his personal life. Obviously, as with any movie with a main character this rigid and emotionally cold, Bill’s life is about to change.
On his way back from a recruitment dinner with deans from Harvard, Bill gets a call informing him that his identical twin brother Brady (Ed Norton with an Oklahoman accent) has died. Reluctantly, Bill heads home, back to a fractured family with an ex-hippie mother and his weed-cultivating (and selling) brother who’s not dead after all, but just needs Bill to pretend to be him so he has an alibi while he travels to Tulsa to settle a debt.
And really, that’s what “Leaves of Grass” is all about: Settling debt; paying back what’s owed. Bill turned his back on his family and his hometown to pursue a career in archaic texts. Despite their flaws, Brady and Bill’s mother have been deeply hurt by this and once this dawns on Bill he tries his best to make up for it. Brady too has a litany of arrears. He owes money to his financier, owes his girlfriend and soon arriving child a better life and owes Bill for tricking him into becoming a criminal accessory.
The movie takes several Coen-brothers-esque turns (it’s directed and written by Tim Blake Nelson, “Saint John of Las Vegas”) involving an orthodontist and the Jewish community of Tulsa. But the emotional center of “Leaves of Grass” is plain to see: At its heart, it’s about personal redemption.
You would think, from the opening scenes of “Jonah Hex,” that it too would be about redemption and resurrection. But in reality, it’s all about revenge. After a quick expository narration about war, the camera centers on a crow sitting on top of a coffin, alone in the middle of the desert. Soon thereafter, we see Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”) tied to a cross, forced to pay for the sins of humanity (specifically the Confederate Army) that he tried to prevent. Yet Hex is no forgiving soul. Perhaps the fact that the cross is on its side, appearing as a giant, macabre X was meant to tip viewers off to this fact; regardless, it’s abundantly clear within minutes.
Jonah’s left for dead that day, made to watch his family die in a house fire set by the evil Confederate General Turnbull (John Malkovich, “Red”). Nursed back to life by an Indian tribe, Jonah inhabits a weird parallel universe where horse-mounted machine guns and RPG crossbows are commonplace during the years following the American Civil War. So, of course, he takes up arms and launches into career vigilantism. When it’s discovered that Turnbull is still alive (he’d been presumed dead in a hotel fire – why he isn’t is never explained) Jonah sets his sights on exacting revenge for his family’s death by destroying Turnbull, never pausing, killing every obstacle in his way.
And that’s precisely the problem. Cold-blooded revenge tales are fine, anti-heroes-based stories are welcome, but “Jonah Hex” is neither of those things. Since the film (based on the DC comic book character of the same name) takes the time to explain Jonah’s back-story, the audience must assume that Jonah’s driving force is his family’s demise. But then, why the wanton killing? Why take up with the prostitute Lilah (Megan Fox, “Jennifer’s Body”), but refuse to commit to a relationship? Why bother to stop Turnbull’s plot to destroy Washington DC?
For instance, Jonah is in a bar, and another patron starts to make fun of his disfigured cheek. Wordlessly, Jonah puts a bullet in his chest, blasting him through a plate glass window. This isn’t an anti-hero; it’s a double-barreled shotgun where a character belongs. Gratuitous violence can be fun if done creatively, but thanks to the movie’s insistence on presenting every scene in short action sequences like the frames of a comic book, there’s no room for even that small measure of reward.
If redemption is paying back what you owe, revenge must then be taking what’s properly yours. They’re two sides of the same coin, and with a little tweaking, Jonah Hex’s story could have been every bit as wrenching as Bill Kincaid’s. After all, the debt Jonah is settling is larger and more tragic. But there’s never any indication that Jonah truly cares about what is owed to whom. Sadly, in the bank of redemption, he’s just a destitute hobo sitting in the doorway, shooting people in the face as they enter and leave.
Lin Weeks is a junior majoring in finance and marketing. Upset with his omission of the DVD you were most excited about renting this week? Vent at [email protected].
