Movie Review: Get Low

LITTLE ROCK — I think it was in one of animal-welfare expert Temple Grandin’s books where I ran across the notion that “anticipating a good thing is better than having a good thing.” Grandin was talking about how animals experience pleasure, and I’m not sure the human psychology is reducible to aphorism, but I believe there’s something to this. Certainly anticipating a good thing is better than being disappointed when you discover whatever you were waiting on really isn’t all that.

I’ve been hearing about Get Low for more than a year now. Somehow, one or two members of the critics’ group I belong to saw it even before it screened at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and lobbied for it to be considered for this award we give to the year’s best Southern-theme film. (That award eventually went to That Evening Sun.) Get Low was amazing, they said, maybe Bobby Duvall’s best performance since 1983’s Tender Mercies. Duvall, they claimed, even had a puncher’s chance at another Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a Depression-era hermit in rural Tennessee who elects to have his funeral before he experiences what the vamp’ers in True Blood call “the true death.”

My colleagues assumed Get Low would get an Academy Award-qualifying release at end of 2009, but instead it bumped around the festival circuit for awhile, probably because its distributor - Sony Pictures Classics - realized that they had a little movie with a chance to do well in some markets, one that actually might benefit from reviews and good word of mouth. I saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival in March, and now it’s opening in Arkansas. Finally!

Well, OK. I am a Robert Duvall fan. I like him when he shows up in big dumb blockbusters; I even liked him in his vanity project Assassination Tango. But I really like him in small, independent dramas like Wrestling Ernest Hemingway and The Apostle.

So I wanted to like him in Get Low. But I don’t. He unbalances what otherwise might be a delicate, sweetly comic movie about mortality and regret; sinking it with his flinty gravitas and careful in articularaties. The movie is, for better or worse, a Duvall showcase, a monument to a remarkable career that leaves us more impressed than affected. Yes, that Robert Duvall is quite the thespian.

But I’d fault the thespian more than the script, which only really falters in the end when it becomes overprotective of Duvall’s character. Duvall, on the other hand, wears us out as the predictably cantankerous Felix, who would have been more compelling had he turned out to be the violent monster he was rumored to be. While we can’t give Felix’s secret shame away here, it’s not hard to figure out that’s it’s really not that shameful, and maybe even kind of romantic.

But the other third - or maybe quarter - of the film belongs to Bill Murray, as a pragmatic funeral director from Chicago, and LucasBlack, as his genial aide-decamp. These are the guys charged with arranging Felix’s living memorial, and I couldn’t quite separate the deference they showed their paying customer to the kind of tribute I imagine director Aaron Schneider (who won an Oscar for his 2003 short film Two Soldiers, adapted from the Faulkner story) must have paid to his aging immortal leading man. One imagines Robert Duvall is not used to losing on-set arguments.

The movie looks wonderful, with a subtle palette of dried-out browns and grays.Give credit to cinematographer David Boyd (he shot the similarly Depression-set Kit Kittredge: An American Girl) and to Schneider, an experienced cinematographer in his own right.

Fairness compels me to admit that Get Low is probably better than it seemed to me. It’s certainly not bad, and I can imagine that people who come to it with lower expectations might thoroughly enjoy it. But my experience is colored by my having experienced the pleasure of anticipating seeing Get Low for many months. Your mileage may vary.