'Get Low' offers high quality acting

An early entry (and likely factor) in the upcoming Oscar sweepstakes, "Get Low" will find favor with audiences who appreciate good acting, perseverance, crusty Americana and crusty Americans, and who believe that Bill Murray is the funniest human in film. Murray isn't the centerpiece of "Get Low," the very capably directed first feature by Aaron Schneider. That would be Robert Duvall, whose Felix Bush is an amalgam of Southern iconography: Grizzled loner, mule-driving misfit and apparent misanthrope, Felix has lived as a hermit for 40 years, because of something in his past.

But with death an increasing possibility for the aging woodsman, Felix decides to rejoin humanity by throwing a party - a funeral party, at which he'll listen to what townsfolk have to say about him, and tell a few secrets of his own.

The man who'll arrange all this frivolity is local undertaker Frank Quinn (Murray), a man whose sense of irony is so ahead of its time he might as well be Lady Gaga in a machine-gun bra. But Frank is the perfect foil for the dour Felix and together with Frank's good-natured assistant, Buddy (Lucas Black), they put together something the town has never seen (or heard): Dobro-virtuoso Jerry Douglas' nouveau-bluegrass soundtrack is like a B12 shot, especially when the pace of "Get Low" runs low. Add to all this Sissy Spacek's vaguely saucy Mattie Darrow, Felix's old flame and a Depression-era girl who plays poker with the boys, and what you have is certainly not some sobering, Walker Evans-inspired portrait of the Depression South.

What it is is bittersweet fun, and a seminar on acting in the American grain.