Monday, September 6, 2010
Get Low
Get Low ia a movie Robert Duvall struggled to bring to the screen. One can see why as the subject is death. An old man who lived most of his life as a hermit decides to have a funeral party while he is still alive with the promise of telling people why he lived that way and a raffle ticket for his 300 acre land for $5. Somehow this movie does not get low enough though I am moved by Duvall's performance. It takes place in the 1930's by the look of the automobiles but Duvall's character lives in the woods. The movie takes place during the winter and chills the viewer by placing one into the cold world of Felix Bush. This coldness suggests the grave he placed himself into when he was a young man. The secret that brought about his self-imposed isolation becomes the hook that compels the story but is less interesting than the man himself and I think we desire to know more about him and less about how he became him. He is a wounded man whose wounds compel him to find healing within and eventually reach out to the community he abandoned years before. Apparently based on a true story I find myself more interested in the man's struggle than his redemption which seems anticlimactic. The last scenes depict the resistance we have to both death and death in life. Coming to terms with one's failings and one's unlived life as well as one's accomplishments is the axis one needs to come to at the end. The axis of how one lived and how one failed to live, our divine (generative) nature and our human (mortal) nature. There is also the puer and the senex drawn together in the story-the younger man played by Lucas Black. I like the Bill Murray character placed in the story for comic relief becuase the inherent heaviness of the mood of the movie but also to show how that heaviness can be transformative. Despite his selfish nature Murray's character seems to grow up a little by the end of the movie.
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I am intrigued. Nobody morbid old man like Duvall.
ReplyDeleteThe premise reminds me of an old comedy sketch a friend of mine wrote. A relatively young man invites two acquaintances to his apartment. Though both men have met the host, they do no know him very well and do not know each other at all. The conversation is marked by awkward lulls, and it shifts toward death. The host reveals his desire to be present at his own wake and hear what is said of him, and he slowly lays back and pretends to be dead. The two strangers give an awkward, impersonal eulogy for this man, which eventually satisfies him enough to come back to life. At the end we discover he has done this many, many times.
The scene was a rarity, in that most of the laughs came from silence and tension. It would be great to see the writer revisit it as an older man and mine it further.