Sometimes, when you get tired of roller-coaster movies, along comes a sunset movie that will do just fine. Felix Bush (Robert Duvall) is a backwoods hermit living in Tennessee. Nobody likes him much and he returns the favor. Rumor has it that Felix has killed a few folks back in the day, but nobody really knows for sure. Still, everybody in town has stories about the reclusive coot.

Old and infirm, Bush decides to put his affairs in order and hold his own funeral while he's still alive enough to enjoy it.

Wrapped around this simple tale is a simple mystery (the film's opening sequence depicts a house on fire and a lone, night-shrouded figure running away from the flames). Somehow the two events are connected, but I suspect director Aaron Schneider hopes we're not too caught up in who did what and why as we come to peel away the layers that drove Felix away from the facade of humanity. Get Low is ultimately a quiet tale of honor and guilt and redemption.

There really was a Felix "Bush" Breazeale, by the way, a Tennessee recluse who threw his own funeral party in 1938. But where truth ends and fiction begins—well, that isn't really important here. As a character sketch, Duvall plays the cantankerous Bush close to perfection. It's only midway through the film that we realize there's a subtle psychological drama unfolding as well.

A superbly subdued Bill Murray plays Frank Quinn, a funeral home director chagrined by the current paucity of deaths in the community. When Bush tosses him a greasy old wad of cash, Quinn decides to throw the old man—and the town—the bash of a lifetime.

In terms of what goes on in Get Low, that's about it. But it's enough. It is, in fact, plenty. Sissy Spacek nicely plays Mattie Darrow, an old flame of Bush's—back when he was the most interesting man in those parts. But a long time has passed, and secrets linger and truths need to be told.

This film tells them, plain and simple.

Walking out of the theater, my wife said approvingly, "This is a sunset movie." I looked perplexed, and she explained, "I can watch a sunset every night, but I can't ride a roller coaster every day."

So consider this film validated, Robert Duvall a quintessential sunset actor and Get Low a quintessential sunset film.