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Get Low

Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek

"When I die, in the newspapers they'll write that the sons of bitches of this world have lost their leader." – Vincent Gardenia, Bang the Drum Slowly

“No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather.”- Michael Pritchard

Have you ever had this happen to you? You go to a funeral of someone you know. As you listen to the flowery rhetoric of the minister and glowing words of the family, your eyes glance down at the bulletin to check the name and picture of the deceased because you knew the person, and they were a lot of things, but the angelic figure being portrayed upfront is not one of them. From the language you can almost picture them playing hopscotch in heaven with Jesus, Moses and Gandhi, but the problem is you pretty much remember the real person, and if he or she was going to get to heaven a lot of grace and more imagination was needed.

A few years back, for Christmas, my parents got grave plots for themselves and their unmarried children. Oh boy, what a way to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, picturing myself spending eternity between my mother and my sister, or as I call it, being bitched at in eternal stereo. (Ladies, it is a joke. I love you. Please don’t get mad.) Still, even though I got the gift that every wide-eyed young man wants, it totally defeated my wishes that, if I die before my brothers, I am to be cremated, the remains placed in three tubes and then, when each one of my brothers die, my remains are to be inserted… Although if there is a paradise, I would love to be standing next to my minister brother to see the look on his face as my wishes were carried out. It would be priceless. (I am joking, maybe.)

While I will probably be thrown in a gunny sack and deposited in the nearest ditch when I die, and it pretty much does not matter what happens to me because whatever was me, in this meat and bones bag, will not be here. (One of the things I have never been comfortable with is when people tell me the dead are watching over you. Okay, that makes heaven not nearly as exciting as one would hope and, two; there are times when you do not want your sainted grandmother and her friends watching you. There needs to be a cone of privacy or something. “Oh, look Ella; it’s your great-grandson. Why is he dancing in his underwear to Barry Manilow’s Copacabana?... Cover your eyes girls. Thank God, we are with Jesus, because I think I have gone blind seeing all that white skin.”) Still, I would like it printed in the newspaper, that you are only allowed to send flowers if you gave me flowers in life, but like everyone, I would like to be at my funeral to see how some people would react. My friend Herb would look at me in the open casket and mutter, “Jackass.” A couple of my ex-girlfriends would show up just to poke the body and make sure I was dead. A couple of family members would do tap dances of joy and most would just raise an eyebrow but that act is about as much emotion as a Norwegian dare show in public. While I would like a couple of songs I loved in life sung, maybe something by John Lennon or Todd Snider, or even the Black Eyed Pea’s “My Hump”, I am sure that a proper 17^th century dirge will be selected, because nothing makes you long for the cemetery more than out of tune, middle class, white people singing a 17^th century dirge.

Much like the fictional Tom Sawyer, we would love to be at our own funeral. Felix “Uncle Bush” Breazeale got that chance. A purely American character, who tumbled out of something Mark Twain wished he would have wrote, Uncle Bush (Robert Duvall) was an eccentric frontier man who lived in the hills of Tennessee. Born in 1864 on his parents’ farm just off Dogwood Road, a street name you could only find in the south, just outside of the small town of Roane. A confirmed bachelor, he stated, “The one I wanted, I couldn’t get, and the ones I could get I didn’t want.” Although colorful in language and deed, there was nothing remarkable about his life. He lived with his parents until their death and then bounced around the rest of his life between relatives before ending up with his nephew Bert. His main joy in life was fox hunting, story telling, and being alone, really an exile from society.

In 1938, at the age of 74, Felix decided to hold his own funeral while he was still alive. It was supposed to be a nice little affair, just a few friends and family, and that was all until the Associated Press picked up the story and printed the upcoming slice of life color piece. In a pre-Internet age, it is not right to say it went viral, but the tobacco chewing woodsman’s funeral spread like wildfire. Newspapers across the nation carried the story. Life magazine and major newspapers dispatched camera men, photographers and reporters to the two Cave Creek Baptist Churches. (That is right, two Baptist churches built right next to each other. Only in America, can you get hillbillies who cannot read or write have a theological disagreement strong enough, one was Missionary, the other Primitive, to cause them to build two places of worship right next to each other.) It is estimated that 12 thousand people, from fourteen different states, showed up to attend the service. Entrepreneurial townspeople and venders sold hot dogs and Coke drove a convoy of soft drink trucks to the event. One local pocketed $300, charging 25 cents a piece to let cars park in his field. Every florist shop between Knoxville and Chattanooga was sold out. Even the funeral director, the handmade walnut coffin, and Uncle Bush, who sat in the front seat of the hearse, were late to the 2 p.m. service because of traffic. The crowd was so thick that Uncle Bush barely made it into the church for his own service. People fainted. Songs were sung, a sermon given, and unlike most of these moments, the man, who people had gathered to say good-bye to, signed autographs afterwards, a trademark “X” as he could not write. The old woodsman promised that it would be his last funeral as, “It was the finest sermon I ever heard, and when I die there won’t be another.”

Uncle Bush became a celebrity. He threw out the first pitch for the local minor league baseball team and then was invited to visit New York City by Robert Ripley, the creator of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” The only thing Felix said about his visit to the Big Apple was, “You know, they were the finest folk, and treated me wonderfully, but to be honest about it, their victuals wasn’t worth a dern.” The old man lived another five years before death came, but this time, his wishes were not honored, another much smaller service, just a handful of friends and family present, occurred.

It is colorful and cute, complete with an uplifting moral, almost everything a person wants in a movie and I believe it will be the sleeper hit of the year. There are a bunch of older actors like, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, and Robert Duvall, getting the kind of roles they can chew up the scenery with.

Verdict: Sleeper Hit