Review: 'Get Low' is stellar cast in unusual drama

“Get Low,” a Faulknerian story of poor Southern charm, desperate grace and polished sincerity, is a character showcase for some of this country’s finest statesman actors — Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek. With names like that, does the plot even matter?

“Get Low” is gripping from the very first shot — a house, isolated on a hill, wreathed in flames. From this ravenous inferno, a man emerges, alight, running for his life. The score screeches with apprehension.

Thereafter, it settles into a plaintive, folksy dirge because the film assumes a slow, methodical pace, secure in unspooling its tale, which we know must, at some point, return to the man and the inferno. We meet Felix (Duvall), who looks like the pictures of the elderly Charles Darwin you find in middle school science books.

He is an old codger, the sort of irascible hermit with whom interloping schoolchildren test their mettle and the threat of the “No Damn Trespassing” sign. Felix is Duvall’s own Boo Radley, all grown up but still every inch the bogeyman. Felix has but few possessions in his tiny shack — a mule, a shotgun and the aged photograph of a beautiful young woman.

He is a plainspoken man of very few words, feared and reviled by the residents of the nearby town, for some act so far in back in the past, that only Felix can recall the truth of it.

One day, Felix hitches his mule to a wagon and takes a rare trek into town to visit the funeral parlor. Murray, who can’t help but be funny, plays Frank Quinn, the town undertaker, a slick salesman who may or may not deal in snake oil as well as coffins.

Felix explains that he needs to prepare to “get low,” but first wants to throw a lavish funeral party while he’s still alive.

“I want everybody to come who’s got a story to tell about me,” he declares.

We sense that is, indeed, everybody. (Their stories, misunderstood half-truths and tall tale exaggerations, are still more than we know).

Felix just might have a story of his own to tell — a 40-year-old confession with the town acting as a corporate confessor, in which old sins are finally dragged into the light, and ancient quarrels set right. The closer Felix gets to the end of his life, the more he can’t let go of the beginning.

“Get Low,” the first feature by director Aaron Schneider, is drenched in period detail (it’s set deep in Depression-era Georgia) with an eye for the minutest details, lending it a palpable, musty sense of authenticity.

The film is about the clash of civilizations — the town, that bedrock of civilization, and the unwedded garden of barbarism that abuts it. Think of Felix as a curmudgeonly Henry David Thoreau. But even more so, this is a comi-tragic musing on mortality, a workman fable of forgiveness and salvation (Duvall has always been partial to stories of sinners redeemed — see “The Apostle”).

Duvall is an actor of unimpeachable talent, whose authenticity is all consuming. At the end of the film, in an almost carnival atmosphere of fiddle music and barbecue, Duvall gives a speech, predominantly in close-up, that most actors would find incapable of imbuing with anything other than maudlin sentiment. Yet Duvall, an actor with half a century, hundreds of roles and dozens of accolades to his name, absolutely nails the truth and sincerity of the words.

But Duvall isn’t the only eccentric in the film. Murray, who has reinvented himself as the quintessence of hipster irony, is more than a placid match for Duvall’s mysterious irascibility.

And Spacek, who plays one of Felix’s old flames, completes this stellar triumvirate. Lucas Black, who was once Billy Bob Thornton’s child sidekick in “Sling Blade” and Bill Cobbs round out the magnificent cast.

GET LOW

Cast: Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray, Lucas Black

Director: Aaron Schneider

Theater: Kimball’s

Rated: PG-13 (for thematic material, brief violent content)

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

GRADE: B+