The American actor currently working that I admire most, bar none, is Robert Duvall. That’s been the case for a number of years. I was lucky enough to get acquainted with the actor back in the ’90s, due to our mutual interest in the cinema of Iran, and I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with him at the Cannes Film Festival, in New York and in Virginia, where he owns a horse farm that is his primary residence (not surprisingly, he keeps Hollywood at arm’s length).
In person, Duvall displays many of the qualities that he exhibits on screen, which is to say that he’s a man of great intensity, sly wit and rock-ribbed integrity. For some great actors, everything is about creating brilliant surfaces; you hardly consider the personality that lies behind the performances. With Duvall, it’s just the opposite. His phenomenal gifts as an actor — and the fictional people he creates with them — obviously reflect the deep-rooted, irreducibly authentic character of the man himself.
As is well known, Duvall has an interest in the South that spans his entire career. It runs from his very first role on screen, as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, through several of his collaborations with the writer Horton Foote (who penned Tender Mercies, for which Duvall won the Oscar), down to his 1997 triumph as writer-director-actor, The Apostle, which I know many Southerners (myself included) consider one of the best movies about the region and its religious propensities ever made.
Duvall is not himself a native Southerner, and perhaps it is too mild to say he has an interest in the region. Rather, let’s say he has a profound identification with the South: its anti-modern traditionalism, eccentricities and general gnarliness. These are qualities that the homogenization of our mass culture has leached out of most of contemporary America, and so Duvall’s essays in stubborn Southern intransigence seem designed to refresh our self-knowledge by leading us, again, to the springs of our cultural origins.
The latest of these dramatic essays, Get Low (now in Triangle theaters), is based on an actual event that briefly mesmerized Americans via radio during the Great Depression. In East Tennessee, a man named Felix Breazeale announced that he was going to stage a public funeral for himself before he died, apparently so that he could hear what people had to say about him. (Who wouldn’t want to listen in on their own eulogies?) The event turned into enough of a circus that it left a small imprint on popular culture.
Taking this incident as inspiration, the makers of Get Low name their protagonist Felix Bush (Duvall) and give him a deeper, darker set of motivations than mere curiosity. The film opens with a striking image: as a rural farmhouse rapidly explodes in flames, a man appears on the upper story and desperately tries to escape, reaching the ground and running away with his clothes on fire.
When the story flashes forward to the 1930s, a very similar — but still intact — farmhouse is occupied by Bush, a long-haired, bearded recluse who has spent decades holed up in the woods, shunning human company. News of an old acquaintance’s death brings him out of his lair and into town with the newly conceived mission of mounting a grand funeral for himself. For assistance, he produces a wad of cash and gains the professional services of the local funeral director (Bill Murray) and his number two (Lucas Black).
In addition to spurring the curiosity — and in some cases, animosity — of the local townsfolk, who’ve long regarded him with a mix of awe and fear, Bush’s return to civilization soon brings him into contact with a woman named Mattie (Sissy Spacek), who appears to be an old flame, as well as a black preacher named Charlie Jackson (Bill Cobbs), who initially resists his appeal to officiate at the last rites. Both Mattie and Jackson, we glean, know something about the long-held secrets that seem to be pushing Bush’s toward a bizarre, public reckoning with his guilty past.
The unfurling of those secrets and the fulfillment of Bush’s plan play out in ways that sometimes come across as a tad too contrived and melodramatic. The film’s screenplay is credited to Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, writers with productions like “Mad Men” and Blood Diamond (respectively) to their credit. I assume they are young, and their work, perhaps unsurprisingly, has the kind of busy superficiality that one associates with an HBO movie, rather than the gut-level authenticity of a Horton Foote script. Likewise, first-time director Aaron Schneider’s handsome, capable mounting of the drama misses some of the ragged edginess that animates Duvall’s own directorial outings.
Get Low thus is not so much a great film as it is a great frame for several familiar and very enjoyable performers. Spacek, who rather surprisingly had never worked with Duvall before, brings both strength and a necessary reticence to her portrayal of Mattie. Essaying yet another oddball supporting role, Murray exudes his usual almost-smarmy drollery as the undertaker. As his assistant, we get another solid turn by one of my favorite Southern actors, Lucas Black, whose credits extend from Sling Blade to Friday Night Lights.
Best of all is the indefatigable Duvall. Looking initially like a cross between Walt Whitman and an Old Testament prophet, the actor conjures a potent blend of menace and mystery, anguish and caustic humor as the haunted, haunting Bush. Now almost 80, Duvall seems possessed of an almost ageless vigor, as well as skills that have now enjoyed decades of refinement. When he takes the screen, the audience knows it is witnessing a master; there’s not a false or hesitant note in his work. Indeed, if Get Low was simply conceived as the pretext for another great performance by Duvall — you can’t imagine the film without him — it succeeds grandly. He is, once again, magnificent.
Incendiary Criminal
Another film that seems to exist to showcase that brilliance of its lead actor is a recent import from France, and though it tells a single story, it is being marketed as two separate movies. The performer in question is Vincent Cassel, whose incendiary performance as arch-criminal Jacques Mesrine I count as the most impressive work by an actor I’ve seen in any film this year. Directed by Jean-François Richet, the two movies are titled Mesrine: Killer Instinct (Part 1) and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One (Part 2).
 To put this two-part work into its rather unusual context, the coming season will see release of not one but two French gangster epics. The other, Carlos, by Olivier Assayas (whose Summer Hours was the No. 1 film on my 2009 10-best list), concerns the political criminal known as “Carlos the Jackal.” It was acclaimed at Cannes and will have its US debut at the New York Film Festival in October. It will thereafter go into release not in two parts but in two versions: the full five-hour version (which I expect will play the Triangle) will be followed by a two and a half hour version.
While I expect Assayas’ film to be the more artistically potent, Richet’s Mesrine movies are powerfully fascinating, and left me amazed that I’d never heard of their subject, whose exploits would seem to make him the Gallic equal of American miscreants like Dillinger, Capone and Bonnie and Clyde, though of a more recent vintage. When Killer Instinct begins, during France’s Algerian struggles, Mesrine is a soldier learning to kill for la patrie. Back in France in the early ’60s, he tries his hand at honest work, but soon falls into robbery and murder. It’s a humble start for what turns out to be a spectacular criminal career.
When things get too hot in France, Mesrine and a female accomplice decamp to Quebec, where they abduct a local billionaire. Caught in Texas and extradited, he’s sentenced to an exceptionally brutal and supposedly escape-proof Canadian prison. Not only do Mesrine and a pal escape, but they also return a few days later, fully armed, to attack the prison in order to spring some of their criminal cohorts.
Back in France in Public Enemy Number One, Mesrine has left behind his criminal apprenticeship to become the nation’s most notorious outlaw. Known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces” for his proficiency with disguises, he seems to glory in his ability to flummox the authorities, play the media and escape any confinement. He even takes the time during one prison sojourn to write his autobiography, Death Instinct (only in France, right?).
Eventually, though, his criminal propensities spin out of even his control. Identifying with Italy’s leftist Red Brigades, he begins to see himself as a “revolutionary,” though one without any evident cause beyond his own enrichment. After he tortures and leaves a journalist for dead, Mesrine’s aura with the public begins to fade, and he heads toward the final trap that the French authorities lay for him.
Though cinematically rather undistinguished, the two Mesrine films are never less than mesmerizing due to the phenomenal central performance of Cassel. Looking like a cross between Bruce Springsteen and Robert De Niro circa Raging Bull, the actor (who gained 45 pounds for the film) tears through the role with non-stop gusto and ferocity, yet also invests the character with persuasive psychological shading. He’s abetted by a fine supporting cast that includes Gerard Depardieu and Mathieu Amalric.
...
read more 
|