Why Old Men Are Mad

If you really think about it, there are at least four problems with Robert Duvall’s latest film, Get Low.

For one, it is set in the 1920s, as if honour is something of the distant past and no longer applies. But it is a theme that constantly recurs among old men and its power may well have been greater had it been set in the present.

Felix Bush (Duvall) did something four decades prior to the film’s beginning for which he’s been punishing himself ever since. He has become a hermit; he has never married; never had children; and never had the pleasure of holding grandchildren, however clumsily.

What did he do? Well, the whole film rests on that and all he really did was fall in love. What’s so bad about that? Nothing. “Like a newborn baby it just happens every day,” singeth Sir Michael Jagger. The only problem is she was married and her husband found out. So did her sister, played by the beautifully aged Sissy Spacek, forty years on.

This leads us to the second problem. Film is a visual medium and we don’t want to hear about what happened in the past or any other time. We want to see it. Film should not be like bad radio melodramas, which are usually premised on events from the past.

In this case, however, it’s a mystery worth seeing played out in Duvall’s performance rather than seeing the actual event with younger stand-ins and so on.

Then there’s Bill Murray, whose funeral director is all over the place. We’re not sure whether he’s a bad opportunist or a charming one or a good con man or what. His persona is constantly getting in the way of his character. We expect the deadpan double entendre and it doesn’t always come, but he doesn’t quite manage to bury it either.

Lastly, Bush has a soft spot for a young man who is clearly the son or grandson he would have liked to have, but that relationship is more unresolved than necessarily subtle. Lucas Black gives an excellent performance as a good, honest man.

So what’s so good about Get Low after all that? Well, everything – even its minor mistakes. Duvall gives a beautiful performance of a man driven part mad, part saintly by his desperate solitude. His comedy is eccentric and inspired and when he is saintly director Aaron Schneider, an ex-cinematographer, merely helps to accentuate a light which is there anyway.

Ultimately the film's strength doesn't reside in the fact that Bush is an honourable man; it lies in the fact that this dear old curmudgeon has been living by a code that is hopelessly misguided, but he's stuck to it. And that is another reason why, WB Yeats might have agreed, old men are mad.

Spacek and Bill Cobbs as the Rev Charlie Jackson, the infinitely scratchy, grateful and patient friend, just add to the rich tapestry of this backwoods yarn of a carpenter (and let us not forget who else was one of those) who holds a party for his funeral before he dies.

Now, my son and I were going to see another film, but it hadn’t started yet and I told him he might prefer to go night skateboarding. I told him he wouldn’t like the film because it was about old people, for old people. But I was wrong. He would have been amused, entertained and instructed about his late grandfather, who would never forgive himself for one year forgetting his mother’s birthday.

Neil Sonnekus