Billed as comedy, 'Get Low' a real heartbreaker

Get Low

By Andy McKinney                  
Gazette/Connection Film Critic

This is the kind of wonderful low budget art house film that you get to do as an actor if you have had a spectacular career and God loves you.  The producers spent a tiny $7 million on this film, an amount that a huge powerhouse like “Iron Man” might have spent on sushi for the cast.  Star Robert Duvall has turned in what might be the capstone performance of his long run in Hollywood.
            
It was the script and not the cash that attracted Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, Bill Cobb and Lucas Black to the film.  Murray has a strong supporting role as a grasping funeral home owner in depression era Appalachia.  Black, Cobb and Spacek have smaller but very strong supporting roles and fill them right up.  The confident, sophisticated, mature acting in this film is seldom seen these days.               

Director Aaron Schneider is known primarily as a cinematographer.  He has two other little known feature length films to his credit but this will be the one he becomes known for.  His expertise with the camera is shown in every cut of this finely crafted film.          
   
The story itself, somehow billed as a comedy when it is in fact a heart wrenching tragedy, is told slowly, carefully and mysteriously.  Duvall is an old man, a hermit in the hills, frightening, distant and alone for some 40 years.  He comes to town to arrange for a funeral which Bill Murray agrees to arrange.  Duvall wants to have the funeral party, as he calls it, while he is still alive, which is unconventional even by the standards of the folk in the remote mountain hollows.               

The extended unfolding of the hermit’s mystery is never hurried and never dull.  We get to the conclusion eventually and I at least was mightily moved to find out why a man would live his whole life in isolation.  It is a heartbreaker.  Duvall is being touted for an Oscar for this role.             

Four strong saw blades for the PG 13 tragedy, “Get Low.”  It runs one hour and 40 minutes.  This artistic film is the success that the previously seen “The American” is not.

Also playing this week are the “Town” which we thought very well of and “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”  Wall Street brings us the return of Gordon Gekko, one of the iconic characters in American cinematic history. 

As always, the Sawmill Theater has movies for everyone, from kid’s flicks, to comedies to the very artistic and touching “Get Low.”  Maybe I’ll see you there.