- I probably complain about this a lot, but it drives me nuts how long it takes for movies on the film festival circuit to get any kind of non-festival release. This movie screened at TIFF last year and it only opened in Toronto (on one screen, no less) yesterday. That’s nearly a year! I suppose we should all count ourselves lucky that movies make it out of the festival circuit, given that some never get a theatrical release. Valhalla Rising, I weep for your lack of Canadian distribution.
- I only saw this for Robert Duvall, who is watchable but not really extraordinary as the Mysterious Hermit of Caleb County™. I like Duvall a lot but Felix Bush feels like him doing what he usually does when he plays old southern gents. He’s seventy-nine years old, I should give him a break, not least of all because I’m sure there are not terribly varied roles for septuagenarians.
- I’m assuming Bill Murray can’t do a Tennessee accent given that he spoke in his regular voice — the whole time in my head I kept hearing him say “I would have named you Kingsley” — and Felix at one point called him out on it. I guess there’s no point in trying it and doing a botched job of it.
- The baby was pretty adorable at the end.
- Funnier than I thought it would be, mostly owing to Bill Murray’s used car salesman schtick.
- I did not love ghost!Mary Lee showing up at the end to indicate Felix had finally died, having rid himself of his tremendous guilt over her death.
- The difficulty with being a mysterious hermit is that it’s likely your real life is not that interesting. It’s not surprising that Felix is not actually an evil murderer and it’s even less surprising that his role in Mary Lee’s death, the event that caused his self-inflicted hermitude and subsequent future as gossip subject for the small-minded townsfolk, was not really his fault. I mean, in the end the wackiest thing about him was his mountain man beard and his propensity for shooting at trespassers. All the references to Felix’s magic or his mysterious hold over people come up pretty short since they’re just window dressing for his perceived craziness that does not exist. Like old man Marley in Home Alone.
I think secretly wanted him to be a warlock of some kind. I just expected something a little more with all the fables and myth-building that turned out not to be a very big part of the story. I think I wanted something closer to a low key 1930s Tennessee version of Big Fish, maybe.
- I liked the music in general but hated that final song they played in the last few minutes. Pretty much ruined the ending.
Get Low
I love the smell of four decades’ worth of guilt in the morning.
IMDB Plot Synopsis A movie spun out of equal parts folk tale, fable and real-life legend about the mysterious, 1930s Tennessee hermit who famously threw his own rollicking funeral party... while he was still alive.