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Aug 10, 2010 By Stephen Humphries Issue #32 - Summer 2010 - Wasted on the Youth

Get Low features an unusually dramatic opening scene: As a fire in a Southern country home reaches flashpoint, a figure stumbles out of a second-story window and flees into the shroud of night, his clothes flaming like an afterburner.

The story jumps four decades to the 1930s, and it’s soon apparent that backwoods hermit Felix Bush (Robert Duvall, sporting a ZZ Top beard) was involved in the incident. To the nearby townsfolk, the cantankerous Bush is so enigmatic that his imagined life is the stuff of furtive whisper and trembling rumor. So it’s a surprise to everyone when the recluse asks funeral parlor owner Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) to stage an open funeral for him—while he’s still alive. Bush, it seems, wants to hear people’s stories about him. Quinn, a natural-born huckster, sees an opportunity to revive his flagging business.

Murray’s droll expressions, heightened by a Claude Rains moustache, elicit numerous chuckles in director Aaron Schneider’s fine debut feature. But one wishes Murray’s character had been more fleshed out, because the film’s pace is slower than a pallbearer’s march. No matter. Duvall’s commanding performance, marinated in his character’s guilt, holds one’s attention as he prepares to welcome the impertinent congregation. (www.sonyclassics.com/getlow)

Author rating: 6/10