Hi there everybody,
I've decided to branch out again today. I will be taking a look at a movie, in this case, what I liked about it. I wanted to bring up this film because it "grabbed" me early on, and it is about coming to grips with a life ending. The movie I would like to talk about today is Get Low. This sounds like the name of a Lil' John song, but it is a reference to being buried, to getting low in the ground. It came out a year and a half ago, in mid-2010. It stars Robert Duvall as Felix, a misunderstood recluse, Bill Murray as Frank, a funeral director from out of town, Lucas Black as his associate, Buddy, and Sissy Spacek as Mattie, a former girlfriend of Felix.
This film comes from an incident that happened in rural Tennessee, back in 1938. The movie is set in an unnamed town in the backwoods of Tennessee, around the same time (though a specific year is never mentioned). In the opening scene, a gang of kids is wandering around on Felix's property, and flee in terror when a shotgun sounds. This is Felix Bush's life. He lives exclusively on his backwoods property, rarely visiting the local town. Everyone tells stories about him, since no one knows what his story really is. He knows that he doesn't have much time left on Earth, and there is something he needs to share before his time is up
So he entertains the idea of holding a pre-death funeral for himself, as in Tuesdays With Morrie. This, however, is decidedly a less cheery affair. This is where Frank Quinn comes in. Frank is a local funeral director who has moved into town from Chicago. He isn't behind this idea at first, but Felix pushes him to help him plan it. The point of this is to hear the stories everyone in town is telling about him, and get his own story out while he can. Pretty soon, people from all over begin agreeing to attend the "living funeral."
Soon, Felix beings getting cold feet, when Mattie emerges. He insists that Frank contact a nearby minister and ask him to attend. However, the minister refuses, unless Felix "tells the truth." This is where we realize there is some deep dark secret, something so awful the minister refuses to face Felix again. Now, I will have to give away some of the surprise of Felix's secret, here. I don't want to, because I'd rather you see it, but I will tell you here, in a way that won't give the whole thing away.
At the end, people end up turning out, en masse, for Felix's "funeral party." The minister had been coaxed into attending, after all, by Frank. Mattie also turned out to see the spectacle. Now the time had come for Felix's big revelation. He took the stage, and told the reason that he had been on his property for decades. He revealed that he had an affair with Mattie's sister. He had planned to run away with her, but one night, 40 years earlier (around 1900), he got in an altercation with her and her husband, a fire got started in her house, and he escaped the burning house, while the woman and her husband burned to death.
Felix had felt to blame all that time. He had exiled himself because he was afraid to face that. What strikes me is that this is actually a very common story. People hide from their flaws or past wrongs all the time. We hide in all sorts of ways. We cut ourselves off from people, we are not truthful, we present false images to others. Felix had this thing weighing on his conscience, and he had had no way of addressing the wrong. He was going to die, so now he had to do it. This was the challenge of this movie. People like to see struggles in movies, and this one was a profound spiritual struggle.
Now, onto some of the parts of the movie that I liked. As I said at the top, it "grabbed" me from the beginning. What got me about it was the people in it. I believed in the characters I saw. There was something about this place and these people that seemed unforced, like it came easily. Now, Robert Duvall has a presence in his roles. It seems to me that it takes about 20 to 25 years for an actor on screen to obtain this presence. His chemistry with Bill Murray and the others made the tension really work. You knew there was this crazy hermit element to him, but he also showed enough of his
A technical aspect of the production that worked was the dialect everybody in this film used. That might seem bizarre, but having learned the distinctions between the dialects of various sub-regions, it caught my attention here. They didn't ham the typical "Southern" accents. The characters used just as much of the Tennessee dialect (since dialect varies in different areas of the South. I will explain these distinctions in a later post) as someone living there would.
Robert Duvall and Bill Murray in Get Low. Note the surrounding details of the period setting.
Aside from how they communicated, the period aspect was done just enough. The volume of old items and materials used was, to me, just the right amount. What I mean by this is that some movies really put forward the exact dates, which sometimes helps, but it also pins the story down as applying more to that time and place. They took the right amount of care to include rooms, recording equipment, cars, etc., from that late 30's-early 40's era, but they included few, if any, references to the time, the way many other movies do. In this way, the movie became a more universal test of coming to terms with a life ending.
The pacing of the story was both good and bad. At the beginning, the interactions between Duvall and the others grabbed my attention, and I never got disengaged from it. Toward the middle of it, the details, and the purposes for the scenes got more obscure. For a while in the middle of the movie, I was worried that I was going to get disengaged.
However, I wanted the movie to work by that point. You know that disengaged feeling, where your mind drifts to "What am I gonna do later?" That's what I am referring to here. Since I believe in the characters and the setting, I was willing to cut it some slack. By the end, it ended up paying off.
Then there was the meaning, that I referred to earlier. Fundamentally, this is a story about fixing a big problem, righting a wrong. Not just a wrong, the wrong. This was the big one, the one that speaks to what people avoid. We live our whole lives trying to avoid facing our shames, our wrongs, our defeats. When Felix decided to hold this funeral for himself, hear the stories people were telling about him, then say what his "big secret" was, that was an act of raw courage.
Having faced this, Felix's life was at peace. A life at peace is a good that people, from people with their whole lives in front of them to those on their deathbeds, seek, but is closer than they think. The reason my Grandmother's passing wasn't as sad for me was because I knew she had had a full and complete life. She had had about as good a life as anyone could ask for. With regards to Fuzz, the jury is still out on whether she could have had "more" in her life. I do know, however, that she lived with no regrets, no shame, no lasting pain that made her hide from the world. Looking back now, that was what made this story stand out.
Well, thanks for reading this "review." I don't know whether this should be called a review, or a synopsis, or what have you. I'll probably figure out a good name for it soon. This is the first of my posts on movies and plays I have encountered that I want to share, and frame, and discuss with you. I look forward to doing more of that.
See ya, and keep wondering, Folks!
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