Tennessee hermits are strange creatures, especially when they hide in the hills and shroud themselves in rumor and legend. As subject matter, they make for strange movies.
But strange is as strange does. Faulkner, for instance, was a strange guy, and Southern Gothic is a strange genre, but their strangeness is majestic and awesome.
“Get Low,” an Appalachian tone poem and a Southern folk film, is likewise awesome in its strangeness. On the one hand, its most memorable image is an old black preacher meandering through a piney wood to the distant sound of scratching fiddles. On the other hand, it co-stars Bill Murray.
Talk about strange.
Robert Duvall stars as the aforementioned hermit, Felix Bush, who lives a reclusive life outside of town. Rumors swirl of Bush’s dark past, and Bush doesn’t help things by beating young men in the street with pick handles.
“Get Low” has cinematography crisp as a winter morning in the foothills, and its acting is high-quality, even by Duvall’s standards. But it still feels more like a literary endeavor than anything else. Equal parts charming and haunting, it’s loaded with the humor and horror of a true Southern novel, as well as its cast of archetypal and moving characters, chief among them old man Bush.
