Color Me Disappointed
I'm a big fan of Edward Norton, Walt Whitman, and I'm a sucker for a good dramedy. I also really enjoy philosophy. So what could be better than a movie chock full of all these things? A lot surprisingly. This film starts out good enough with Norton playing two separate characters Bill and Brady, twin brothers. Bill, a college professor of philosophy, has done all he can to distance himself from his home town in Oklahoma. He hasn't seen his pot growing, pot smoking, white trash brother Brady or his hippie mother in thirteen years. Brady on the other hand has embraced who he is and lived a free and wild life. Unfortunately Brady's free living has put him a bad situation with some major drug dealers and he needs his twin brother to help him out of it. Sadly that's about as good as the movie gets. Shortly after Bill arrives in Oklahoma the movie simply spirals around it's self and stalls. The film starts to feel aimless and in the end nothing really feels resolved, not the conflict between brothers or Bill's own loathing of his past. The comedy aspect of the film also seems to vanish about a third of the way through and is replaced with a bit of romance and some over the top violence that sucks the humor right out of the film. Norton's acting is superb, as usual, and it's really cool to see him play two such different characters at the same time. The film had great potential, but somebody screwed up somewhere and turned it into a snooze fest that didn't really mesh up by the end. If you're a mega Norton fan then you might get some enjoyment out of the film, maybe. Others need not bother.