Get Low

Robert Duvall seems like he has been around forever. He has been making movies as long as I've been seeing them, starting with Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962. He has been nominated for an Oscar six times, winning once for Tender Mercies. He's one of the best of all time. His new film is Get Low which is a nice starring vehicle for an actor who is 79 years old. Duvall's character is a mysterious old hermit in the 1930's, who arrives in town one day to arrange his own funeral which is to take place while he is still alive. After the local minister (Gerald McRaney) demurs, the director of the local funeral home (Bill Murray) and his assistant (Lucas Black) step in and offer to arrange the funeral, for a price. At first the reason for Duvall's character to want this kind of funeral after avoiding human contact for 30 years is mysterious. One person who may know something is Duvall's sweetheart (Sissy Spacek) from 50 years ago. But even she is in for a surprise when all is revealed.

The story of Get Low is loosely based on a real-life hermit in Tennessee who arranged to have a funeral in 1938 while he was still alive. The funeral became a huge event with as many as 8,000 people attending. The denouement of Get Low is also a huge funeral with Robert Duvall in attendance along with a casket that he made himself. Of course, this is a movie so Duvall has a dark secret that has been eating away at him all these years and he wants to unburden himself before he dies. Even though Get Low has several A-list Hollywood actors, it still has the feel of a small Indie movie. The director, Aaron Schneider, is a first timer but he is a long-time cinematographer and won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short in 2003.

 Get Low is an entertaining movie, not the least just to see Robert Duvall and Bill Murray together on the screen. The two roles of curmudgeonly hermit and smarmy funeral director were made for these two guys. Lucas Black does very well up against these heavyweights and it's nice to see Sissy Spacek too. The two parts of the story, the first, whimsical, and the second, very dark, don't fit together that well, but Get Low is still worth putting on your Netflix lists even though it is mostly gone from the theatres. I'm guessing Duvall will get an Oscar nomination for this one.