Get Low

Some movies have all the promise in the world, but then you find that they let you down. They get lower than they should. They get let down by something. I'm going to say it's laziness or a lack of funds, and ignorance. Why else would waste the efforts of Robert Duvall and Bill Murray?

The movie's premise intrigues the viewer. There's a hermit with a gun yelling and shooting at kids who throw stones and break his windows. He catches one and the kid pukes. So he lets the kid go. Perfect. He's a scary dude, but he's not a bad dude. Obviously this scraggly-bearded hermit dude is tortured. Why else would he live alone? We guess that all this torture has to do with the opening scene of a house in the woods in flames, and someone escaping via a second-storey window, in flames themselves. They run away, still in flames. They run past us, the guys with the movie camera, still in flames. Cut to scene with kids throwing rocks through windows. Next hermit dude heads into town on his wagon, being towed by his mule, to figure some things out. We reckon that the scene is set in the 1920s. In the American mid-West. He goes to the church of course. The minister is courteous, but not interested in the hermit's proposal to have a funeral before he's dead. The hermit says he wants to hear the stories that people have about him. He says he wants to hear them while he's still alive. The minister thinks this is disingenuous. The hermit thinks the minister is full of, and proud of, his own shit. The hermit leaves. When he gets to his wagon and unhitches the mule, people watch and whisper. One town idiot with a big mouth yells out. Tells him the whole town knows all about him, and he throws a few stones at the hermit to make sure he gets his attention. The hermit dude says, "What?" and plays possum long enough for the idiot stone-thrower to walk over to the seeming frail old man, who sets about kicking the poor young idiot's ass with a stick he pulls out of the back of the wagon. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. There are cliches at work here. A lot of them. And Duvall makes them worth watching. And then when Bill Murray shows up as the desperate and moderately greedy undertaker willing to make the Felix the hermit's funeral wishes come true, the story takes yet another positive turn. But two positive turns do not put it in the right direction. You know that if you're shooting a rifle, you don't have to miss the mark by much to miss, period.

Can you write a nostalgic period piece morality play, if you don't care about the simple details enough to get them dead right? It's little things that set me off. That make me think that someone's not paying enough attention. For instance. The funeral director (the aging, jaded, Chicagoan) and his man (a young family man with a boy-child and a cute, but firm, wife) drive a 1927 Henney Hearse. Beautiful. At one point the man is going to set off to ameliorate the wily and miffed hermit. The man needs the hearse to drive there. He says so. The funeral tosses him the keys, just like Dad might toss the keys to his own boy, and the man drives off in the hearse. Except that keyed ignitions weren't common until 1949 when Chrysler made them common. I did not know that this was the history of keyed starters, but it just felt wrong when the old guy tosses the keys to the young guy. It felt like the director was trying to tell us something about the relationship, but he was using a language that wasn't in sync with the times. So it just didn't ring true to me.

When these sorts of minor misses occur, I get edgy about what big misses might be in the air too. I get edgy because the director (and maybe the writer too), in a period piece, needs to get it right, or he might be better off setting the story in a time he knows, and he will get it right. Why worry, you ask? Because sloppiness begets sloppiness. The plausibility of a whole community's inability to understand the cause of a 40 year self-exile - after a housefire in which said hermit's lover and husband die - seems far-fetched. In fact it borders on ridiculous that the dead-in-flames lover's sister (who was also a former lover of hermit Felix), Maddy, played by Sissy Spacek, greets her sister's former lover, the hermit Felix, with warm regard after 40 years of not knowing where he'd gone to. But this is all played straight, and we're to take it as likely that she would be cordial, even winsome, when she sees the old man again. It's inconsistent and, by the end, awkward and maudlin.

Duvall, however, is great to watch. The redemption of the film is that I can aspire to age and wear my stiffness like he does. He's proud and competent, and will not be undone by his body. Oh to grow old and have your mind be your strongest asset. For that hope, Duvall offers an inspired performance. Besides that, Get Low, doesn't quite get it right.

Ride report

in: -16'c wind NW 30ks

out: - 8 wind NW 25ks