“Get Low” (2009)

Some movies sound great on paper.  “Get Low” promises so much by virtue of casting alone.  Having Bill Murray play opposite Robert Duvall is a mouth watering prospect.  The prince of dead pan comedy together with the most subtle and restrained American actor of the post-Brando generation.  Throwing Sissy Spacek, another 40 year veteran, into the mix makes the combination even more interesting.

Duvall plays Felix Bush, a grizzled hermit in the depression times of the American south.  Nearing death and carrying a huge weight of guilt Bush emerges from self imposed isolation and engages Murray’s Frank Quinn, an undertaker, to organise and promote a living funeral.  Bush encourages attendance by raffling his property at the event.  Initially suggesting that he’s curious about what his neighbours think of him, it slowly emerges that the funeral’s real purpose is to provide Bush an audience for public confession.

It goes without saying that Duvall and Murray are both excellent.  The script gives the latter space for his trade mark dry comedy yet Murray’s character is melancholy and ethically challenged and requires much more of him than the old “Ghostbusters” schtick.  Duvall’s role recalls perhaps his finest ever leading part, the guilty preacher in “The Apostle”.  A practicing Christian in real life, Duvall excels at playing sinners struggling to reconcile human passion with spiritual grace.

There are flaws only on the periphery.  One or two lines of dialogue are anachronistic, expressions of the early 21st century not the late 1930s.  There’s also a colour blindness in a crucial piece of casting that detracts from the film’s verisimilitude.  Having Bush’s best friend played by a black actor lacks credibility considering the racial politics of the era.  The fact that no one seems to recognise or comment upon the character’s ethnicity reflects more the wishful thinking of today than the realities of Tennessee in the Great Depression where segregation and prejudice would have been the norm.

If you can get past this and the even more unlikely suggestion that as a young man Bush built a church for a black congregation without being shunned as a “nigger lover” and strung up by the Klan, “Get Low” is a moving tale of redemption, one whose humour and human warmth off set any threat of piety.  Whatever liberties have been taken with the story on which it’s based as both character study and moral fable it rings emotionally true.