REVIEW: True Grit

5 01 2011

I haven’t seen the 1969 John Wayne “True Grit,” so I can’t really put the Coen Brothers’ “True Grit” into that context or perspective.  What I can do, however, is look at it as just another one of their movies that just happens to be a second film adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel.  As it turns out, the movie fits in perfectly with all the rest of the Coen canon.  After some of their high-brow humor hit a sour note for me, I’m glad to see them return to form in the kind of movie they are best cut out to make.

Everything moviegoers have come to love in the directing duo over the last quarter-century is on full display in “True Grit.”  The nihilism, the bleakness, the dark humor, the biting dialogue, the crazy and three-dimensional characters are all there in full force.  While it may not be the high point for the Coens, the movie is definitely an exclamation point on their careers thus far.

The truest grit of the movie belongs to 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a tenacious Southern girl who can talk fast enough to make your head spin around, drive one heck of a bargain, and make your jaw drop with her rugged tenacity.  She’s looking for a way to avenge her father’s murderer, the lawless drunk Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin).  Mattie looks to a U.S. Marshal that fits a similar description, the unreliable, uncomely Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges).

But she’s also not the only one hunting Chaney; Mattie also has to contend with LaBeouf (Matt Damon), a Texas Ranger with a voice uncannily similar to Matthew McConaughey’s and so dead-set on doing his job that he’s about as big of a joke as Matthew McConaughey.  LaBeouf and Cogburn assume they are a two-man searching party, but Mattie, insistent on seeing justice done herself, tags along much to their chagrin.  The three cross into the Indian Territory, enduring much lifeless terrain on Cheney’s trail.

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F.I.L.M. of the Week (December 31, 2010)

31 12 2010

I don’t quite know how to end a year in movie reviewing … that’s a little awkward.

But want to know something more awkward?  “Man on the Moon,” my pick for the “F.I.L.M. of the Week.”  (And to close on a good note, F.I.L.M. stands for First-Class, Independent Little-Known Movie.)  Perhaps awkward isn’t the right word for it, though you’ll undoubtedly feel the strange sentiment many times while watching the movie.  It’s intelligently quirky and undeniably of the oddball variety, which makes it one of the most wonderful off-color movies I’ve ever seen.

The nomadic comedian Jim Carrey has never been so at home than here as Andy Kaufman, the comedian of the ’70s and ’80s who became an incredible enigma for audiences nationwide.  His unique style was meant to be, as he called it, an “experience” for the audience meant to drum up laughs, affection, and hate.  This roller-coaster ride of emotions wasn’t exactly something that sold, and his refusal to budge from his principles made it hard for him to get many jobs on TV.

The movie, directed by two-time Academy Award-winner Milos Forman, does more than just chronicle the bizarre career of Kaufman; it attempts to resurrect the man himself.  “Man on the Moon” gives us largely the same experience that Kaufman wanted his audiences to have.  We are meant to raise an eyebrow when he stands motionless for a minute on the first episode of “Saturday Night Live” or when he reads the entire novel “The Great Gatsby” instead of doing his routine for a rowdy college crowd.  We question his alter ego, the crude and crass Tony Clifton, a fat bar-singer parody.  And then we don’t quite know what to make of a lot of it, but his refusal to conform is often hilarious and always entertaining.

As movies like “Little Fockers” tear up the box office charts but inspire groans from the audience, this may be the perfect time to watch “Man on the Moon.”  Andy Kaufman, who dared to be different, found humor in silence – and his comedy is a wacky experience that no one has ever repeated since.


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REVIEW: Tron: Legacy

30 12 2010

The so what factor looms large over “Tron: Legacy” as it thrills the eye but leaves the mind way in the dust.  It provides a visual spectacle in an entirely digital world that’s dazzling enough to merit the extra cash for 3D and IMAX.  But even with all of that firepower, when the credits roll, it leaves no sort of statement or impact.  It’s almost as if the movie wants you to leave your experience in the theater and take nothing with you.

The movie features a storyline that can be understood only in its most general sequence of events.  It’s a step up from its predecessor’s plot – which was about as intelligible as binary code – in that it makes sense and has a simple theme at its core.  “Tron: Legacy” deals with perfection and its ultimate subjectivity pretty sloppily; I doubt the writers even know what the words utopia and dystopia mean.  And in a year where “Black Swan” provided an all-encompassing cinematic exploration of similar themes, an ugly stepchild is a generous term of endearment for this movie.

Nearly two decades after the mysterious disappearance of his father, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) investigates a strange page in the run-down family arcade.  What he doesn’t expect, though, is to get unwittingly swept into the server that his father built where he is ill-prepared to face the hostilities of the computer.

In a world of “programs,” Sam (the 2010 model of Jake Sully) is a rare “user” and thus hunted by the tyrannical power of the server, CLU (also played by Jeff Bridges).  Only thanks to Quorra (Olivia Wilde), the protege of the now Zen Buddhist-like Kevin Flynn, is Sam saved from almost certain death or deresolution.  Kevin has discovered life-changing developments for the real world inside the computer but has been exiled thanks to CLU’s evil bidding and unable to escape with the information.  However, Sam’s arrival opens up a mystical portal to the outside world, and the journey there takes them to the ends of cyberspace, including a stop off at the house of a David Bowie-wannabe (Michael Sheen).

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Classics Corner: “The Red Shoes”

29 12 2010

After seeing “Black Swan” and being totally captivated, I decided it was about high time that I caught up with “The Red Shoes,” a classic movie about ballet.  Turns out, I was missing quite a bit.  Hopefully the ballet fever inspires other curious film lovers to check out this 1948 British film from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

At their core, the movies aren’t that different.  Both are movies about a dancer torn by how far they want to sacrifice themselves to their art.  Much like “Black Swan” put on an outstanding visual show for audiences today, “The Red Shoes” was – and still is – a Technicolor feast that’s vividly and brightly illuminated visuals that wowed audiences six decades ago.  But while Darren Aronofsky’s latest film is best viewed by artists or cinephiles, “The Red Shoes” is completely relevant to anyone caught by two conflicting desires in their life.

For Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), it’s her heart and her feet.  A promising ballet dancer who’s good but not great, she’s taken on by Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) the same day he hires a new composer, Julian Craster (Marius Goring), to coach the orchestra.  Her natural grace wins over Lermontov, who casts her as the lead in his new ballet, “The Red Shoes.”

An adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale (like the movie itself), the ballet tells the story of a dancer who receives a pair of red ballet shoes.  Eager to dance, she takes off across the world in the shoes.  But when she tires, the red shoes don’t and keep on dancing.  Craster is hired to compose the music for the ballet, and the nearly 20-minute dance sequence is a joyous and transcendent exaltation of the power of orchestra and dance.

What comes out of the ballet is more than just praise for Victoria and Craster; the two fall madly in love.  The business-focused Lermontov sees their affair as a distraction to Victoria’s dancing, claiming that she can never reach her full potential if love holds her down.  He fires Craster only to have Victoria walk out on the company.  She’s happy in marriage yet still longs to dance “The Red Shoes” again, never finding the satisfaction in other ballets that she found in that role.  But since Lermontov owns the rights, she’s forced to make a clear-cut decision of love or career with heartbreaking implications.

The beginning of “The Red Shoes” is a little too expository for me, and the whole thing is a touch too melodramatic.  But compared to some of the classic movies I’ve watched recently, this rings very true and feels hardly dated at all.  As a story of choices and commitment, there’s nothing classic about it – this is just as contemporary as anything nowadays.


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REVIEW: The King’s Speech

28 12 2010

There’s a cynical term for movies like “The King’s Speech” that has become so overused that we forget how derogatory it can actually be: “Oscar Bait.”  People assume that when you throw together Academy-friendly stars in a movie set at least a few decades ago with some pretty costumes and fancy sets, the movie is made just to win a few Oscars at the end of the year.  In essence, we are completely disregarding the art and looking only at the competitive aspect, which is only an auxiliary component of the filmmaking process.

But Tom Hooper’s movie reminds us why this so-called “bait” often works: his story of King George VI’s incredible triumph over his speech impediment with the help of a gifted Australian therapist is a rousing chronicle of a peculiar kind of history.  It doesn’t feel like a page of a textbook but rather a fresh look at a historical figure.  While it’s not revolutionary or incredibly remarkable, “The King’s Speech” makes for an inspiring and very entertaining trip to the movies.

Whether due to his tumultuous childhood or just a lack of confidence, Albert (Colin Firth) cannot speak without a stammer and can hardly speak at all in public.  To remedy this as the radio forces the royal family of England to be a vocal as well as visual presence, his wife (Helena Bonham Carter) turns to Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an obscure Australian speech therapist in London with rather unorthodox methods.  At first, Lionel seems like a crackpot to Albert, who is used to working with specialists who are more like witch-doctors practicing ancient voodoo rituals.

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REVIEW: Winter’s Bone

26 12 2010

For a long time, “Winter’s Bone” was a blank box that needed to be checked on my essential 2010 movie viewing.  Now that I’ve seen beside Debra Granik’s gritty drama, the movie remains little more than a box that I’ve checked.  It’s bleak and unsparing, not meant to be anything grandiose or over-the-top, yet in accomplishing this goal, the movie manages to make itself rather forgettable.

At the center of the movie is a fascinating heroine, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), forced to be a mother to her younger siblings as her father has disappeared and her mother is incapable to care for them.  She’s forced to become the best bounty hunter of 2010 (take THAT, Gerard Butler) when she’s informed by the police that since her father put the family home for bond, she will lose it if her father doesn’t show in court.

Commence a search for her father amidst the backdrop of the Ozark drug dealing underworld, where she encounters plenty of unsavory figures with some disgusting meth faces who don’t want her nosing around in their business.  They recognize that she will stop at nothing to save her family, and with Ree’s determination, she could lead the wrong people into their operations and put a pinch on their profits.  She finds one ally in her uncle, Snowflake (John Hawkes), who does his best to protect her.

Lawrence gets the opportunity to play a very strong and courageous female character in Ree, and as the movie’s landscape bores, she keeps us drawn into the action.  The sheer trauma of facing reality and the consequences of her father’s actions is overwhelming, yet Lawrence manages to play it with such subtlety that it fades into the mountains with the rest of “Winter’s Bone.”  I wouldn’t jump straight to awards for Jennifer Lawrence, but my discordant voice is practically inaudible among a chorus singing her praises. B- / 


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F.I.L.M. of the Week (December 24, 2010)

24 12 2010

With “True Grit” hitting theaters this week, I thought it would be as good a time as ever to visit a very different side of the Coen Brothers with the “F.I.L.M. of the Week” – their romantic comedy side.  Yes, believe it or not, the two quirky violent directors made one, although “Intolerable Cruelty” isn’t much like the normal ones that Hollywood churns out.  It’s a fascinating examination of our divorce and marry-for-money culture that’s a true winner.

In Los Angeles, Miles Massey (George Clooney) is a wildly successful divorce attorney.  He’s well-known by all in the field for his “Massey Prenup,” an agreement which has proven to be impenetrable.  He’s vicious in the courtroom and can figure out a way to get their clients exactly what they want in the divorce settlement, even if that means leaving their ex penniless.

But he soon meets his foil in Marilyn Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a quintessential gold digger, using marriage only to gain wealth and financial freedom from a quick divorce.  In order to ensure a more favorable settlement from her husband Rex, she hires Gus Petch (Cedric the Entertainer), a private investigator, to “nail his ass.”  But even with their documented evidence, she’s no match for Miles in the courtroom who leaves her with nothing.  Bitter, she concocts a plan to enact revenge on Miles that hits him where it hearts the most: in the heart.

It’s easy to call “Intolerable Cruelty” the least “Coen Brothers”-y movie that the brothers have directed since it’s their only movie to date not based on an idea by them.  But everything you love, minus the gruesome violence, is on display here with a bit of a lighter touch thanks to actors like Clooney and Zeta-Jones.  It’s well-written with many fascinating plot twists and witty one-liners.  While there’s still some mainstream humor on display, there’s definitely some of that trademark dark and quirky Coen Brothers humor.  So if you’re looking to enjoy one of their movies and can’t quite stomach “No Country for Old Men,” plop yourself down for “Intolerable Cruelty” for all the fun of the Coen Brothers without all the darkness.


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REVIEW: How Do You Know

23 12 2010

I sure wish “How Do You Know” knew what it wanted from the beginning.  James L. Brooks’ latest comedy is a study of three people uncertain of what they want for their futures.  Nervous, frantic, and anxious, they each search for the answer to the questions they pose about their lives.  But no one ever seems to find an answer, just a new question to occupy their thoughts.  This makes for dynamic and neurotic characters, all portrayed with gusto by the sensational cast, but the movie feels like it’s running  in circles around the same issues.

Lisa (Reese Witherspoon) is looking for a new life direction after her softball career is abruptly ended.  George (Paul Rudd) is unsure of the next step in his life after being served an unexpected indictment.  Serving more as comic relief, Matty (Owen Wilson) is an organized womanizer trying to figure out whether he loves Lisa enough to change his ways.  “How Do You Know” is really the story of Lisa and George, though, as they actively seek conviction in their life choices and wind up finding each other.

The two are incredibly vulnerable and emotional train-wrecks, never certain of where they are headed even when they begin a sentence.  It starts out with George, caught between a rock and a hard place with pressure from his dad (Jack Nicholson) mounting as his head is about to be served on a platter to the prosecutors.  But when the two meet on a blind date, all the neuroses transfer over to Lisa, who becomes increasingly unsure of her decision to move in with Matty and unable to remain committed to anything.  While George’s options become more black and white, he is still just as lost as Lisa, and the two manage to find comfort in their mutual wandering.

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REVIEW: The Fighter

22 12 2010

As Mena Suvari’s teenage temptress Angela Hayes told us in “American Beauty,” there’s nothing worse than being ordinary.  In the ring of boxing movies, it’s all too easy to become ordinary.  While the latest contender to take a punch at the reigning champions, David O. Russell’s “The Fighter” is a little too lightweight to compete, it’s got some nice heart.  And as practically all movies about the sport have taught us, soul is all that really matters, right?

However, this isn’t really a boxing movie so much as a movie involving boxing.  It’s mainly a story of brotherhood, family, and pride that’s made all the more fascinating because it’s true.  As many cinematic boxers preceding him have, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) works a low-paying, labor-intensive job to make a living since his boxing career won’t exactly pay the bills.  In his corner, he has his brother, former prize fighter Dickie Ecklund (Christian Bale) who became the pride of their hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts after triumphing over Sugar Ray Leonard.  Now, he’s an unreliable mess so addicted to crack that HBO is doing a documentary on him.

Micky is in many ways inexorably tied to his family with Dickie as his trainer and his tenacious mother (Melissa Leo) as his manager.  She performed the same role back when Dickie was in the ring and often still acts like his manager as opposed to Micky’s.  She puts an emphasis on family unity, which is tough for Micky to swallow as his many trashy half-sisters are often very overbearing.  Micky’s familial concerns lie with his young daughter being raised by his bitter ex-wife and her husband, neither of which want him to have any part in her life because of his lifestyle.

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REVIEW: The Tourist

20 12 2010

There could be worse things to watch for an hour and 45 minutes than a cinematic worshipping and idolization of the physique of Angelina Jolie.  As if “Salt” wasn’t enough for 2010, Sony takes her out of action figure mode and gives us “The Tourist,” a whole movie of Jolie in red carpet mode.  She elegantly struts across the scene in beautiful gown after dazzling dress, all accentuating her best features: her eyes, her lips, and her figure.  If you aren’t floored by her beauty by the end of the movie, go get your eyes checked.

But as your mom taught you in middle school, looks aren’t all that matter; you have to have a good personality to be truly attractive.  Inspect anything other than Jolie in “The Tourist” and you will find one snooze of a movie.  Half-heartedly a romantic comedy and half-heartedly an action thriller, it fails to satisfy as anything more than eye candy.

As the lover of con man Alexander Pearce, Elise (Jolie) finds herself tracked heavily by the police and the mob.  He tells her to find a man of similar build to him and masquerade around Venice as if he were the elusive Pearce.  On a train, she nabs Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), a math teacher at a Wisconsin community college headed to Italy on vacation.  She entices him by a tease act and then manages to rope him into following her around by money and luxury.

From there, it’s a game of mismatched expectations as she sees him as expendable while he thinks she is romantically interested in him.  In his mind, the movie is a classic romance in Italy, and he proceeds as such.  Yet in her mind, it’s like a James Bond movie where he’s a pawn.  The two visions clumsily intermingle, resulting in one very uncomfortable blend to digest.  Jolie and Depp have zero chemistry, and even though it’s not necessarily required for the movie, neither have any sort of a game face for it.  The action sequences are slow and boring, failing to breath any sort of life into “The Tourist” which flails for its duration in desperate need of a respirator.

Director/writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck strangely follows up the sublime German thriller “The Lives of Others” with this confused, uninteresting popcorn flick.  Even with a few fairly predictable plot twists to keep us mildly engaged, nothing can save this awkwardly comedic and dully action-packed movie from being one of the least exciting movies to grace the silver screen this year.  Sure, thanks to Angelina Jolie, it’s easy to watch.  But as a movie, it’s hard to bear.  C / 


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REVIEW: Mother and Child

19 12 2010

 

Most movies that we eagerly anticipate, we run out to see in theaters in the first few weeks of release.  Those that we leave for video are ones that we expect to be trash or those which we had no real desire to see in the first place.  Why do we have these low expectations?  Because, for the most part, Hollywood perpetuates them.  What we save to see on video is rarely any good.

But then again, with these low expectations, it’s just that much easier for a movie to sneak up and floor us.  Such is the case of “Mother and Child,” Rodrigo Garcia’s hyperlink drama intertwining three different stories of maternity.  As the style becomes slowly hackneyed by the system, it’s a nice ray of hope that someone can still get it right with a story built around three strong female characters and hard-hitting situations.

As Karen (Annette Bening) prepares herself for the imminent death of her mother, she can’t help but wonder what has become of the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was 14.  As she and her mother were never particularly close, she finds herself overcome by guilt and wistfulness, wishing she could have the time back to repair the mother-daughter relationship.  It doesn’t help things that Karen discovers post mortem her mother found the daughter of their Hispanic maid to be more like her child.

Then, there’s Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), whose hard-knock childhood has led her to be a family-spiting woman driven only by rationalism and furthering her career.  Her life is exactly as she wants it to be: unsentimental and free of unnecessary relationships.  But love finds a way into her life in the form of her boss, Paul (Samuel L. Jackson), and she soon finds that what she avoided for so long arrives on her doorstep.

Dead-set on adopting a child, infertile Lucy (Kerry Washington) has her mind on nothing else but becoming a mother.  Desperate to feel that maternal bond, she lets her marriage fall by the wayside in the mere hope that Ray (Shareeka Epps) will give her the child inside her womb.  The need to be a mother ultimately drives her to emotional extremes that alarm her friends and family.

Bening, Watts, and Washington all turn in performances so emotionally charged that it stings.  They bring so much passion and feeling to the project, and it exudes from the screen like a bright beam of light.  But it’s Garcia’s script, so thoughtful, beautiful, and heartbreaking that “Mother and Child” makes for one emotionally wrenching watch.  Providing three distinct takes on what it means to be a mother, it’s a deeply moving moviewatching experience – even sitting on a couch. A- / 


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REVIEW: Waking Sleeping Beauty

18 12 2010

As part of the generation who grew up loving the second wave of Disney animated classics such as “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” and “The Lion King,” it’s interesting to see a full-length documentary about the creative team that made it all possible.  Enter “Waking Sleeping Beauty,” a chronicle of the second Golden Age of Disney animation from 1984 to 1994.  It covers all the struggles of ushering in the new era and all the fantastic successes of the finished products they put on screens before a sea of exciting moviegoers – and then all the struggles that success created.

It’s a little different than most documentaries in that all interviews are done through audio; we never see any ex post facto commentary from the people who brought us these classics.  There’s so much footage of the animators themselves that perhaps Hahn thought viewers would best be served by seeing the process take place (since that is, after all, what most people want when they sit down to watch the movie).  But without their faces, it’s hard to establish characters outside the main narrative, which makes it feel more like a narrated sequence of events than a documentary.

While the power struggles between CEO Michael Eisner, Board Chairman Roy Disney, and studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg are fascinating, they lack some perspective that could have taken “Waking Sleeping Beauty” to the next level.  I love these Disney movies and I love seeing the creative process that got them made, but I still wonder what distinguishes this documentary from any other bonus feature on the DVDs for these animated movies apart from its length.  It feels like something Disney would show at the 25th reunion for “The Little Mermaid” animators – fun for everyone, but only truly pertinent to the people involved in it.  B / 


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F.I.L.M. of the Week (December 17, 2010)

17 12 2010

There’s no place like home for the holidays … unless its the home of your boyfriend’s overbearing family.

Such is Christmas for Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker) in the “F.I.L.M. of the Week,” Thomas Bezucha’s “The Family Stone,” a winter dramedy with a perfect balance between the two genres.  It’s enjoyable to watch at any time of the year, but it has a particularly warm and loving embrace around the holiday season.  With a fantastic ensemble and pitch-perfect writing, this movie has been a favorite of mine ever since it hit theaters five years ago today.  (And yes, I was there to see it on its first showtime that day.)

It’s always tough meeting the potential in-laws, and the uptight Meredith doesn’t leave the best first impression as she tries to simultaneously be herself and be charming.  The odds are against stacked against the potential new addition to the Stone family as Amy (Rachel McAdams) has it in for her after a dinner in New York didn’t exactly endear her to the incessantly blabbering throat-clearer Meredith.  The tension is only heightened by matriarch Sybill (Diane Keaton), determined not to give her mother’s wedding ring to Everett (Dermot Mulroney) for him to put on Meredith’s finger.

Yet not everyone is determined to see her demise: the fun-loving prodigal son Ben (Luke Wilson) does his best to bring out the welcome wagon, and the ever-reasonable father Kelly (Craig T. Nelson) is determined to give her a chance.  But after a day, Meredith mixes with the Stone family like oil mixes with water, and things go haywire as the holiday spirit combines with mean spirits.  The result is a hilariously potent comedy about the importance of family, both the ones we are born into and the ones we create.

I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t mention the heavier side of the movie.  Much of what happens in “The Family Stone” is due to an unpleasant truth about the future of a member of the Stone family, and it had been quietly kept secret until Meredith arrives.  The movie is not only a comedy but also a deeply touching and heartfelt look at our families and how much we value each member of them.  Around the holidays, there’s simply nothing better than a movie that can make you laugh and cry with the people you love the most.


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REVIEW: The Expendables

16 12 2010

If you aren’t willing to forget all cinematic standards, “The Expendables” will be a dismally stupid exercise in corny filmmaking that is only good for mockery.  But if you are willing to watch an hour and 30 minutes of Sylvester Stallone and a bunch of other fading action stars trying to be cool, then you will have one rip-roaringly fun ride.

The stars you recognize are clearly far from their glory days in the 1980s, and Stallone has given them the opportunity to relive them while they wait for their AARP cards.  With a little help from Jason Statham and Jet Li, action stars of a younger generation, they manage to walk through every ridiculous motion that the trigger-happy movies of decades past so seriously that it becomes riotously funny.  (Except I feel like Stallone doesn’t know that he’s not actually cool, so someone needs to man up and tell him.)

“The Expendables” is actually one of the best worst movies I’ve ever seen, so enormously entertaining in all its shortcomings.  There’s everything to love about an action movie in excess, especially blood and gore.  The violence gets so absurd and comical that there’s no appropriate response but laughter to how unrealistic it gets.  But the humor doesn’t stop at the slaughtering of villainous drug traffickers; the script is equally as silly, providing Stallone and company with plenty of horrifying one-liners to utter and hackneyed plotlines to follow.

Hollywood gives us plenty of movies to enjoy if we simply lower our standards.  “The Expendables” is easy to enjoy if we simply have no standards.  C+ / 


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REVIEW: Get Low

15 12 2010

It’s always nice when a movie like “Get Low” comes along.  While it’s nothing earth-shattering for cinema as we know it, the movie is just a witty but serious drama propelled by great performances by capable actors and an interesting script that keeps the plot moving.

Robert Duvall stars as the aging hermit Felix Bush, living pleasantly in solitude as the town surrounding him seeks to make him a sort of urban legend.  Rumors abound that he’s a cold-blooded killer and a devil worshipper.  Granted, Felix doesn’t do much to stop these notions, chasing off trespassers with a shotgun and putting up “beware of mule” signs.  But all of a sudden, Felix decides to emerge with a grand plan – a living funeral for the entire town to attend.

It’s hard to tell exactly why Felix wants this at first, particularly because Duvall has given him such a hardened exterior that masks all his true intentions.  Yet pulsating underneath is a heart and soul, and only an actor like Duvall can make it beat in such a profound way.  Slowly but surely, he unravels the character until we see Felix completely unexposed, and the sheer raw emotion makes for a powerful last scene where Duvall goes broke.  The success of the entire movie rests on Duvall and his ability to convey a whole host of emotions at once, and “Get Low” works because he is in peak form.

While the whole business of “getting low” keeps things fairly serious, there’s plenty to keep the movie a light and enjoyable watch.  Bill Murray is perfectly cast as money-grubbing funeral parlor owner Frank Quinn, who makes the living funeral something of a carnival attraction to make up for bad business.  It’s a sly, devious, and understatedly humorous character, and Murray milks it for all the comedy he can get.  It’s Felix who gets us to start chuckling as he unwillingly does ridiculous promotional stunts, but it’s Frank who keeps us laughing with his off-handed comments.  Add in Lucas Blacks as Frank’s second-in-command along for the ride and Sissy Spacek as Felix’s old love to make things grave, and you have one heck of an acting ensemble.

There’s nothing to go proclaim from the rooftops about “Get Low.”  It’s not going to amount to much more than nice acting, a suitably engaging script, and a glimpse at some beautiful Southern woods and forests.  But sometimes, that’s just the kind of movie you need.  B+ / 


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