Get Low (Sunday, August 1, 2010) (87)

Get Low is a little movie with a big cast. Felix Bush (Robert Duvall) is an old hermit living in a cabin in the woods in the 1930s. He is crotchety only occasionally leaves his house to go into town, where he generally gets into fights with people there. One day he shows up at the funeral home run by Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) and says he wants to throw a funeral party for himself so he can have people tell stories about him. He offers a ton of money to do it and Quinn and his assistant, Buddy (Lucas Black), agree to help him.

It seems that Felix has a story of his own he wants to tell. He did something bad a long time ago and he's looking to confess to his party and get absolution. Somehow this thing he did has something to do with Mattie (Sissy Spacek), a long-ago lover of his. It also has something to do with a black preacher (Bill Cobbs) who Felix helped at some point.

The whole film is built up for this one big reveal - but when it comes it's utterly unmoving. The pacing of the film, the script (by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell) and the direction of the film (by Aaron Schneider, who seems to have worked a lot previously as a cinematographer, but not much as a director) are all really bad.

There is a string of scenes to open the film that sorta give us some texture of the environment, but don't really move the story along well. Major scenes are framed so badly that you can't see primary characters behind trees or other obstacles. In general the film is not very funny. It's silly at times, but sorta cheap and uninteresting.

In it's best moments it has the feeling of a bad Ealing comedy from the 1950s - but mostly it feels like one of those bad Coen Brothers Ealing-redux movies from a few years ago (Intolerable Cruelty and the Ladykillers). Overall I am impressed that such a big cast would do such a movie - but the final product is not worthy of their big names. It's a very OK movie and nothing totally offensive, but really nothing brilliant.

Stars: 2 of 4