‘Get Low’ starring Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray
‘Never Let Me Go’ starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield
“Get Low,” a dark comedy released in 2009 and “Never Let Me Go,” a dramatic film with a surprising twist, deal with similar themes of regret and loss, though one is much more entertaining to watch. Both films, out on DVD, have a great cast and an interesting storyline, but “Get Low” has the edge.
Get Low
Robert Duvall and Bill Murray make the film, directed by Aaron Schneider. Duvall plays Felix Bush, a hermit who lives in the backwoods of Tennessee during the Depression. Murray is Frank Quinn, a funeral director who is desperate for some death to come to his town to save his floundering business.
For reasons that are not clear until the very end of the film, Bush decides to throw himself a funeral party. The only quirk is that he wants to be present at the wake and he wants to listen to the stories people have to tell about him. When the local reverend (Gerald McRaney) refuses to take his money, Quinn’s assistant Buddy (Lucas Black) decides to offer their services to Bush. It seems like a win-win for the funeral home since the lonely Bush has lots of money to spare and is willing to spend it since he has no one to whom to leave his estate.
Rumors about Bush swirl around town; some that he is a madman, some that he is a murderer. There is even one rumor that he might be trying to gather the town folks into one location just so that he can slaughter them all. The only person who seems to see the good in Bush is Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek.) Mattie has recently returned to town when Bush starts working on his funeral plans. She was married and widowed, but she and Bush had a history together when they were younger.
The nature of their relationship and Bush’s withdrawal from society are all explained at the end of the film. It’s a sad story, but the journey to the end is amusing. Murray can’t help but be funny, while Duvall and Spacek hold together the more serious scenes in the film.
The funeral begins to turn into a circus, but Bush brings it back to what he wants it to be – a chance to reveal his biggest regret in life and ask for forgiveness.
Never Let Me Go
As with “Get Low,” the lead characters in “Never Let Me Go” have a lifetime of regret even though they are decades younger than Robert Duvall’s Felix Bush. The movie is directed by Mark Romanek, who played the movie in subtle tones and allows a somber mood to permeate the entire film. The movie is based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro that could be consider science fiction – or at least fairly removed from reality.
Kathy (Carey Mulligan) cares for people who are donating organs. She is 28 years old and has become as reflective about her life as Bush is in “Get Low.”
A large portion of the movie is told in flashbacks – to when Kathy was a 9-year-old at Hailsham Hall and to when she was 18-years-old and embarking on life on her own.
Kathy (played by Isobel Meikle-Small, as a child) attends an English boarding school in a rural part of England. She is best friends with Ruth (Ella Purnell, as a child) and the two share a lot of secrets with each other. The only thing they seem to disagree on is Tommy (Charlie Rowe, as a child) who is taken to bouts of angry shouting when other children tease him.
The children at Hailsham seem to be normal, with their academics and athletics, but the children are deathly afraid of going outside the boundaries of the school. There are rumors that any child who has left the school surroundings has died in the woods.
As a new teacher at the school, Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins) questions who told the children about the deaths. The answer is that everyone knows the stories are true, but no one knows how they first heard them. Aside from the stories, one of the signs that these kids might be different is that the headmistress Miss Emily chastens the students when she finds cigarettes outside one of the buildings. She says it is important to the health of all children not to smoke, but especially to Hailsham students who must keep their insides healthy.
Miss Lucy tells Kathy’s fourth-grade class what life has in store for them – their destiny is predetermined and they have no say in what happens when they graduate from Hailsham. They will be organ donors, with three to four surgeries conducted to harvest organs before they “complete,” or die. Most of them will not make it out of their 20s.
For the second part of the movie, the teenage incarnations of Kathy (Carey Mulligan,) Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield,) live together in some cottages. By now Ruth and Tommy are a couple, with Kathy left on the outskirts. An older couple tells the trio of a rumor that donors can get a deferral for true love so that they can live together for a few years before their first surgery.
The last part of the film returns to Kathy when she is working as a caregiver, traveling from donation centers to tend to different donors. When she discovers Ruth, who is ill after two donations, she reconnects to her childhood friends. Ruth has a regret that she tries to rectify before she is gone, and Tommy and Kathy have to tend with their own regrets from the past and for the future they won’t have.
