GET LOW: A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN
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GET LOW…A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN
Heretical as it may be to dis a Robert Duvall movie, Get Low, a film that pretends to show us that good and evil are not poles apart but intertwined, remains a slow-paced movie that upends no conventions and ends with a mawkish celebration of the basic goodness of even the most ornery soul. It begins with the image of a man fleeing a blazing fire, leading us to believe that he’s the one who torched it before running for his own safety. Soon enough, we meet the grizzled recluse who has secluded himself from the community for forty years, taking intermittent potshots at those who invade his space or cross his animals. Duvall has owned this character and played variations of it for many years so that now, with nothing new added to the formula, the performance and the film are predictable and boring. We know that beneath his meanness beats a heart that has been broken – the only remaining question is how.
The other stock characters are the cynically dry con-man perfected by Bill Murray twenty years ago, who walks through his part without an ounce of deviation from all past renditions of this type; the naive young man who needs to learn a thing or two but discovers that his moral instincts are a bigger asset than his brain; the compassionate, schoolmarmy Sissy Spacek whose life has remained unfulfilled and the wise black preacher (morphing Bill Cosby) who does the right thing despite some initial recalcitrance. Twangy music reminds us that we are in the backwoods of the south during the depression with a director unwilling to go beyond the standard buzzwords of this era to find something singular and fresh in either script or music.
By the movie’s end, we’re meant to believe that Duvall is more victim than villain, that Bill Murray will do the right thing, and that the other lesser characters are noble and true blue. So Duvall’s final confession to the community is not about a murderous crime that he committed but about the burning passion that he and his adulterous sweetheart felt for each other, a passion that ignited flames set by an aggrieved husband, not by our hero. Shucks – he weren’t a bad man after all.
There is an annoying and dishonest moral here – that evil is relative, not absolute and that understanding its context will clarify our misapprehensions. Having recently watched an interview with Duvall on television in which he expressed diametrically different personal opinions about the state of world affairs and American politics, I’m not surprised that he sleepwalked through his performance, perhaps withholding the spark of originality from the shopworn conclusions that he recognized as patently bogus. Do yourself a favor and see Winter’s Bone instead.
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