Get Low: Putting the fun back into funerals

Felix Bush (Robert Duvall) is resident the boogeyman in the woods, taciturn, bearded and ornery, living alone outside some wintry Midwestern town in the cabin he built 40 years ago, shotgun at the ready should any varmints need a fright. We’re between world wars here, not that the affairs of the world cause many ripples in Bush’s hermetic existence. Bush hires former Chicago car salesman-turned-funeral home director Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) to arrange his own funeral-party, a stab at realizing the universal fantasy of hearing what the bastard-hypocrites say about him when he’s gone without having to actually depart. Everyone is invited.

The cast is pretty great across the board. As Quinn’s protégé, Lucas Black is charged with the task of playing straight man to Murray, not necessarily an enviable position when you consider that Murray’s approach to comedy is unfailingly deadpan—he’s already his own straight man—and though sometimes at odds with the uneven tone of Get Low as a whole, Murray’s performance, watchful, allusive, and bristly as his John Waters moustache, is about the closest to understanding the real strengths of the material. Fortunately Black holds his own just fine. He plays the action, letting the comic moments simply breathe, grounding himself in his character’s moral fortitude and genuine ambition to do right by Bush.

Duvall cultivates Bush’s enigma scene by scene. He’s very comfortable here and in fact very good, unconcerned with what the others are up to since Bush is holding all the cards in every scene—in keeping with the trickstery nature of his preemptive death rites, he’s always one step ahead of everybody else. Even when Get Low ushers him onto the climactic podium to spill his guts, Duvall understands that his vulnerability is to displayed but in no way is it to be challenged, the whole death trip steering us not toward an open forum but a one-on-one between Bush and his maker—and, okay, the wonderful Sissy Spacek with her glowing eyes—that the public is merely allowed to be present for.

Herein lies the problem with Get Low. Based on a true story that grew into something of a folk tale, molded into a screen story by Chris Provenzano and Scott Seeke, scripted by Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, and realized by Aaron Schneider, the film ultimately betrays what was fun about its premise. The first act is filled with the promise that everyone has a story to tell about Felix Bush, yet when the funeral party finally happens and the whole town turns out not a single speaker shares the mic with Bush and Quinn. They just huddle some distance from the outdoor stage and rhubarb discreetly. The open stage turns into a one-man show, banking everything on the big reveal that by this point has pretty much already been revealed in piecemeal though a number of twists as predictable and ornamental as the story’s basic premise is intriguing. The sense of Get Low’s straying from its own path is further solidified by Schneider’s overly solemn and ominous direction, which, from the fiery opening flashback onward, too often anticipates what’s to come, and by Jan Kaczmarek’s over-used score.

There are nonetheless pleasures to be had in Get Low, which seems at heart to want to be a humanist comedy. The slight modulations in Duvall’s expressions alone are worth the effort, and his one extended sequence with Spacek has a rhythm and a certain grace to it that would be difficult to locate in a film that would not allow for such unhurried gentleness between veteran actors. In this respect Schneider should be applauded. Duvall, now 79, seems like one of these actors who could just keep going forever. It’s been over a dozen years since he made The Apostle, a major career highlight, and I wish he would direct again. In the meantime, I’m happy to see him find young directors who know how to stand back and let him do his thing. And I’m happy to see a director smart enough to let Spacek do just about anything.

Who's Bad?: Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart

We see this old buck amble out of his ’78 Suburban, sunglasses on, pants undone, brimming jug of highway pee ready to be upturned on the sun-baked parking lot. He’s arrived at the bowling alley where he’s to play tonight’s show with some local band he’s yet to meet. He’s seen better days. His manager has to nag him to write some new material. He’s 57-years-old, he’s got $10 in his pocket and a bad dose of hemorrhoids, but he is, after all, a country singer, so this creaky list of lamentations means a new song should practically write itself. Crazy Heart is the story of how this singer hits rock bottom and starts to pull himself back up. It’s a very familiar tune played with some genuine freshness. It’s a well-crafted, thoughtful movie for adults. It might have been respectable and kinda ordinary, but it stars Jeff Bridges, a fact that elevates the picture to the level of something you probably don’t want to miss.

It’s nothing new to say that Bridges is one of the most underappreciated actors in American movies. They may be actors just as good that you’ve never heard of, but none who have spent so long on the cusp of the limelight, who've starred in countless big Hollywood movies yet is most beloved for the cult favourites. (You know what I'm talking about. This isn't Bridges' first time in a bowling alley.) Bad Blake, the weary yet resilient hero of Crazy Heart, an aging country troubadour addicted to booze, smokes, rough women and tawdry telenovelas, is yet another performance of shaggy beauty and pathos from Bridges, who already won the Golden Globe for the role and will hopefully get the Oscar he richly deserves. Bridges looks like Kris Kristofferson and sings a bit like Merle Haggard. The film’s music, a set of unusually strong and poignant songs, comes from T-Bone Burnett and Kristofferson’s late collaborator Stephen Bruton, but Bridges makes it his own, as he does with every gesture in the movie, however fleeting: the way he wakes from an accidental nap and muzzles three cigarettes from his bedside pack, the way he fumbles with a chain lock with no hook, or breads fish fillets while talking on the phone to a younger woman he’s fallen unnervingly in love with. It’s just a pleasure to watch him, even while he slips toward wreckage.

Based on the novel by Thomas Cobb, Crazy Heart marks the debut of actor turned writer/director Scott Cooper. There are more than enough elegantly wrought moments throughout the movie to prove Cooper’s got chops, such as the shot where we watch a witness to an accident rush toward a crashed car in the reflection of the driver’s half-open window. There are wonderful bits of dialogue. “How are you, Bad?” an old friend asks. “I’m worse,” replies Bad. “What do you want to talk about?” asks a fetching young interviewer, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. “I want to talk about how bad you make this room look.” There’s a supporting turn from an effortlessly charming Robert Duvall as a spry barkeep that’s virtually worth the ticket price alone. Duvall’s also one of the movie’s producers, and once played a country singer himself, in Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies.

It’s only in the movie’s last third or so that it begins to reveal its weaknesses: a baldly contrived bit of conflict to hurl us toward climax, a too-neat final scene, a little much too much squinting from a well-meaning Colin Farrell as Bad’s hugely successful protégé, and the hurried unraveling of Gyllenhaal’s love interest, a character who feels a bit undernourished for the emotional gymnastics she’s asked to perform. But such a handful of bum notes can hardly steal anything from Crazy Heart’s resonant grace, one that flows from the heart of a rare young filmmaker more concerned with letting great actors create gentle magic onscreen than impressing restless viewers with empty glitz, two words that pretty much epitomize everything wrong not only with a lot of shitty movies but with most country music in the last 30 years or more.