Supposedly based on a real incident that took place in Tennessee
in the 1930s, Get Low as transformed into a movie turns
out to be a showcase for the considerable acting talents of Mr.
Robert Duvall, but unfortunately not much besides. Even the
presence in the movie of those other national treasures, Bill
Murray and Sissy Spacek, in engaging character roles is not enough
to make up for the lack of narrative energy or moral seriousness.
Mr. Duvall plays Felix Bush, a curmudgeonly hermit living in the
Tennessee woods who decides to give himself a funeral party before
he dies. Or not. His inability to make up his mind — party or no
party? — does not become any less tedious because we assume that
he will eventually go through with it or even because, as it turns
out, the point of the party is to give himself an opportunity to
confess to people for miles around what he considers to be the
shameful episode in his past that induced him to take to the woods
in the first place.
Felix’s 40 years of shunning human society — “the first
38 are the hardest,” he observes wryly — are therefore
counterbalanced, in a manner of speaking, by the circus, complete
with radio coverage, a raffle, and a blue-grass band, at which he
proposes to confess his darkest and most shameful secret to any
idler curious enough to turn up to hear it. “I built my own jail
and put myself in it and stayed there for forty God-damned years,”
he says at one point. But now, having served what he apparently
regards as his time, he says to Mr. Murray’s character, Frank
Quinn, a raffish undertaker, “I want an end-of-the-line,
tell-it-all, get-out-of-jail funeral.” Being raffish, of course,
Quinn readily agrees. His assistant, Buddy Robertson (Lucas Black),
serves as the voice of conscience, both to him and to Felix — “For
everyone like me, there’s one like you, son,” says the latter
appreciatively — but he has no problem with the old man’s public
confession for the entertainment of a mob.
Does anything about this scenario strike you as
implausible? If so, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Naturally, I am
forbidden by the critic’s code to reveal the nature of the
confession that we know is coming, though a hint of it is given in
the film’s opening sequence of a house on fire. But I don’t think
anyone will be surprised to learn that what strikes Felix Bush as
shameful enough for him to hide his head from public view for 40
years will not strike many others that way. Indeed, the public
nature of his confession combines with the nature of the confession
itself to reinforce our sense of it rather as something to be proud
than ashamed of. His final plea for forgiveness to a bunch of
strangers, none of whom he has injured, thus sounds less humble and
penitential than it does like an actor’s bid for applause — which
will naturally be forthcoming.
Clint Eastwood already made this movie back in 1992, only
he called in Unforgiven. It was about an aging hired gun
who made something of a public spectacle of his own shame and
despair. Or, I should say, his pretense of shame and despair, since
real shame and despair don’t run to public spectacles. But even
Clint’s William Munny didn’t think of staging his own funeral as
public confession. That movie rested on a certain appeal to
authenticity — as does Get Low, apart from such verbal
anachronisms as “kick your ass,” “I’m outta here,” and “I busted my
ass for you.” I guess there is something in the self-consciously
great actor which such a combination of authenticity and
theatricality appeals to, as it obviously does to the many
connoisseurs of great acting who promote their enthusiasms in the
blogosphere these days. But it doesn’t, at least not by itself,
appeal to me.
