Aaron Schneider's "Get Low'

It is rare that a fine actor delivers the performance of his career in his 80th year, but Robert Duvall does so in Get Low, an unheralded film by first-time director Aaron Schneider that stands out amid the usual trash of summer blockbusters like a flower on a dunghill.

Duvall plays Felix Bush, an aging recluse who keeps the world at bay with a shotgun. A truly violent man is always a shock, and Felix seems the genuine article. Even in the rural Tennessee of the 1930s, where Get Low is set, Felix gets a wide berth from the local townspeople until he comes among them, gun in hand, with a strange invitation.

Felix has figured that it's about time for him to "get low"— that is, buried— and he wants to throw a funeral party for himself. He wants, moreover, to observe it. Those who attend will share a raffle of his 300-acre property, no small inducement in hardscrabble Depression-era country. The only thing they must do, each of them, is to tell a story about him.

Felix is a legendary character, and stories about him abound— all false, as he knows. He wants to hear them nevertheless, and then to have the lies refuted by someone who knows the actual truth of his life.

The only man who can do that is, of course, Felix himself, but his truth is too terrible to tell. What he will settle for is a eulogy by someone who knows him and will make a presentable case.

Undertaker's payday

Felix finds encouragement for his scheme from the local undertaker, Frank Quinn (Bill Murray), who, with his wide-eyed assistant, Buddy (Lucas Black) sets out to make the arrangements. Frank is the kind of shrewd but undercapitalized fellow sometimes found in small towns. Death is a steady business, but pine coffins don't always pay the rent. Felix's party will be Frank's payday.

But who can speak for Felix? His former fiancée, Mattie (Sissy Spacek), conveniently turns up, but she won't put in a word. Felix forces poor Buddy to track down a black pastor (Bill Cobbs) whose church Felix built, but the pastor too declines the honor. Felix is left, at last, to make his own confession before a world of strangers.

Thus stated, this is a sufficiently threadbare plot. In the pantheon of Calvinist pride, however, no one stands more surely condemned than the self-judged man.

God's indifference

The sin that Felix bears is one he cannot confess, lest he be too easily forgiven. The magnificent cross he carved for the old pastor's church is one he insists on carrying himself. He intends to carry it to the grave, but he finds he cannot do so without some word of grace. When no one will speak it for him, Felix has no choice but to confess before a crowd as indifferent as the God in whom it is no longer possible to believe but also impossible to do without.

Duvall has often seemed a man carrying a burden since his film debut nearly 50 years ago in To Kill a Mockingbird. He almost always does this well, but mannerisms have sometimes crept in with the years.

In Get Low, however, his Felix Bush has internalized his guilt behind a fiercely protective exterior, and his portrait of a man whose truth must pierce the mask that has not only isolated him from his fellow man but from himself makes a fascinating study. No one, in fact, can live alone with his truth, which is what confession ultimately means.

Strange duet

Duvall receives excellent support from the other principals, notably Bill Murray. Murray's Frank Quinn is the one character in the film who is genuinely indifferent to redemption or damnation; his job is to bury people at a price. Souls are a pastor's business. The undertaker will learn something too, but his hardy cynicism keeps the film from veering toward vagary or sentiment.

Older comedians can often project the bottom line with a minimum of gesture or fuss, and Murray, as he has aged, has settled into a world-weariness that brooks no rebuttal. He and Duvall are well-matched in the strange duet they must perform.

Aaron Schneider's direction keeps the film's leisurely pace from dragging, and his cinematography gives the sense of a time and place that have vanished from our lives. In the end, though, it is Duvall's performance that makes everything cohere. His Felix Bush makes you realize how much of the master American narrative we've lost with the death of sin. A modern Felix would get it all off his chest in therapy. To err is human, but what if to forgive is no longer divine?

Get Low is really a film about the crisis of the Puritan conscience. If that crisis has passed, is it because conscience has done so too? That's not necessarily a gain.