Movie Review - 'Get Low'

Get Low Starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, and Sissy Spacek Directed by Aaron Schneider Rated PG-13

You don't have to look to far to find a great Robert Duvall performance. Pick a movie and chances are he'll be good in it. Sometimes, as with The Great Santini or his own The Apostle, he has the ability to raise pretty average stuff to great heights simply by being that much better at his job than nearly every other actor who has ever drawn a breath. Duvall is one of the best film actors we've ever seen, but more importantly, he's and one of the best and most empathetic interpreters of character we'll ever see. In his latest film, Get Low, Duvall plays a man who reaches a conclusion we all must if we live long enough, namely that we've lived long enough. We won't be around forever. And it's bittersweet to see Duvall at this point because, at 79, he'll leave a vast void sooner than later. Who is the next Robert Duvall? And how long will we have to wait to see him? Get Low is a retelling of an unusual occurrence. In 1938, Felix "Bush" Breazeale came out of seclusion - where he had spent most of the century, minus a few trips to town here and there - to plan his own funeral. Except Felix wasn't really dying, see; he just wanted to be around for his own funeral to hear what people had to say about him. He hires a funeral home (run by Bill Murray and Lucas Black) to not only put together the event, but help him advertise it. Yep: Felix's funeral that's not really a funeral would be the social event of the year. Pretty good for a guy who lives alone in the middle of the Tennessee woods and is more whispered about than spoken to. Then there's the girl. There's always a girl. In this case, Felix bumps into Mattie (Sissy Spacek), who a lifetime ago - before he grew a backwoods beard - made his world go 'round. But there's a dark part of their history, and it's the sort of secret that just might make a man discard everything he's known to become a recluse. As with The Apostle, one of Duval's only self-directed projects, Aaron Schneider's Get Low is not aiming for the moon. It is, however, concerned with the gentle details of a peculiar story, and it knows enough to know that overdoing it would shoot the film in the foot. The characters in Get Low are presented truthfully. If there aren't big enough laughs or nefarious bad guys or the most comfortable solutions, that's just the way it is. What is really good about it, on the whole, is the casting. There are reasons filmmakers want to work with this version of Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, and of course, Robert Duvall. Each is best left up to his or her own devices, and more often than not, characters similar to these are the ones they naturally lean towards, particularly the post-Lost in Translation Murray. He has gone from a very vocal, smirking comedian in his early successes to a character actor who still sees the world from the same warped perspective but doesn't have the energy to entertain everyone in the room with his observations and witticisms. Few actors make a peaceful transition from what they used to be known for to something different as well as Murray has. Spacek needs a bigger role here, although Mattie's impact on Felix is so large that it's kind of addition by subtraction. That's something she's always excelled at, as well. Rarely do you think, "Boy, Sissy Spacek was so overbearing in that movie." She's a utility infielder who could start at any position. Then, again, there is Robert Duvall. You have to watch him and wonder if he starts fresh with each character or if he calls upon that unbelievable history every time out. That it could go either way speaks volumes about his honesty as an actor. Most performers would read the script for this film, recognize that at its center is a funeral scene with a major opportunity to coerce the audience into some phony emotion with a protracted speech. Duvall doesn't play it that way, and in fact, the real impact comes with just a couple sentences in the scene that follows it, because Duvall knows the payoff isn't for him, it's for the character. And he's known it for half a century.

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