Robert Duvall has played every species of Southern-fried kook, crank, and coot that a screenwriter ever dreamed up, and many more that were just hauled out of the attic and given a light dusting. But one thing he can’t play is weak. He’s oaken, stiff, craggy, indomitable and kind of eternal. Remember the second Lord of the Rings movie where there were those thousand-year-old anthropomorphized trees, played by bad computer graphics?
They should have got Robert Duvall to play the trees, and even without makeup it would have been more convincing. I imagine a movie where Robert Duvall and Clint Eastwood are both cowboys, and they’re mortal enemies. The whole movie they just stare at each other and hem and haw and grit and groan. It’s 13 hours long, and in the end no one wins.
But weakness is just what we’re supposed to see in Duvall’s new character, Felix Bush, in Get Low, or at least glimmers of it flickering through his craggy, knotty exterior like sunlight through the walls of a poorly-put-together wooden shed. We don’t quite get that effect, but Duvall’s as watchable as ever, filling in the gaps between his sparse sentences with all sorts of little affirmative exhalations, and adding strings of grunts and winces to the ends of his monologues, as though he’s not quite ready to surrender his time to the other actor — not just yet, be patient. I wished the camera had followed his lead, and had clung to him closer and for longer. Like in The Wrestler, where we felt so suffocatingly close to Mickey Rourke, as he ambled and breathed like a water buffalo, that by the end of the film would could swear we knew what his breath smelt like.
Felix Bush is an old man in maybe the 1940s, in probably the southern states somewhere, and he has a big secret. Living as a hermit in the woods — one of the first scenes we see has him replacing a “No Trespassing” sign with a “No Damn Trespassing” sign — he one day decides to organize a funeral for himself. “Boy, are you in luck,” says Bill Murray as Frank Quinn, the town’s alcoholic funeral director. Bush, who has risked the curious stares of neatly-dressed extras to get to this funeral parlour, explains that he wants to hold the event before its subject has died. We soon learn he plans to reveal his great secret to the townsfolk on the big night.
So, Murray’s deadpan, moustachioed director and his young assistant named Buddy Robinson — a name which, unfortunately, tells you everything you need to know about the character — set about exploring the man and arranging his pre-death wake.
There are times when I wish more modern movies were just cheap stage plays. We love watching greats like Murray and Duvall chew through their lines — any lines at all! — but the predictable and tawdry sets, costumes, editing, lighting and plick-a-plunk musical score surrounding the whole thing is enough to make you yearn for simple cardboard backdrops unafraid of their own artifice.
Our hero’s great secret is slowly stripped away as the film plots its brown course. The secret involves a welcome Sissy Spacek as Bush’s former lover, who tells us he used to be a terribly interesting man. It involves Bush’s hermitage, which he reveals to an old priest was intended as a form of self-punishment (“I wouldn’t even know how to hold a baby,” he cries to the priest in a rare occasion when the writing catches up with Duvall’s conviction). And yes, the secret is revealed, and the burden is lifted in the end.
This stuff aspires to be a sort of Faulkner-lite, and maybe it is. But while the punishing gems of southern American fiction tend to be coloured with the moaning fatalism of New World Protestantism, there’s something kind of Catholic about Get Low’s moralistic fable. It resembles a story one might encounter in one of those “The Lives of Saints” books that — I am told — Catholic children thumb eagerly. Bush is a saint and therefore inhuman because he seems unable to develop the self-justifying sense of moral superiority that, I think, a real human being would develop to deal with an intensely guilty situation. His life of self-flagellation and his unburdening mass-confessional are tears from a statue. If you believe a man can carry this guilt with him, unprocessed, for decades, then you might believe he can be saved by a confession, then you might believe in this movie.
