Hermit Felix Bush (Robert Duvall, left) gets tidied up for his funeral, while Buddy (Lucas Black, centre) and Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) look on, in the comedy-drama Get Low. (Sam Emerson/Sony Pictures Classics)In 1962, Robert Duvall made his feature film debut playing the mysterious eccentric Boo Radley in the Southern-gothic classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Half a century later, Duvall has almost come full circle with his new movie, Get Low. As Felix Bush, a mysterious eccentric living in the Tennessee backwoods, he’s the target of wild rumours and curious little kids in the same way that Boo was. And, if he’s not mentally deficient like Boo, then there’s still something not quite right about him.

Bush has spent the last 40 years as an ornery hermit, with signs outside his cabin that snarl “No damn trespassing” and a loaded gun to back up his warning. Then one day, he hitches up his mule, Gracie, rides into town and tells the local preacher (Gerald McRaney) that he wants to arrange his own funeral. And he wants to hold it while he’s still alive.

Duvall builds the character of Bush like a master carpenter. There’s nary a sign of nails or glue in his beautifully shaped performance.

Get Low, the first feature by U.S. director Aaron Schneider, is based loosely on the “living funeral” staged by a real Tennessee hermit, Felix Breazeale, in 1938. Schneider and his screenwriters, Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, have fashioned that local legend into a simple, folksy yarn that serves mainly as a showcase for the elderly but still sly and spry Duvall.

After fleeting roles in the recent Crazy Heart and The Road, the 79-year-old actor gets to stay a spell and let us appreciate his impeccable craftsmanship. Early in Get Low, we learn that Bush is a carpenter whose unique furniture is so artfully made that it shows no signs of how it was constructed. Duvall the actor builds a character the same way. There’s nary a sign of nails or glue in his beautifully shaped performance.

While Bush can’t get the preacher to agree to his unorthodox funeral, there are others more than happy to fill his request. Namely, the town’s wheeler-dealer undertaker Frank Quinn (Bill Murray, with a pencil-thin moustache and a hound dog expression). It seems the Depression has even hit the death trade and when Quinn hears about Bush’s crazy idea, he sends his young assistant Buddy (Lucas Black) to woo the old man’s business. Bush’s plan, which involves throwing a big party and raffling off his land, promises to be a cash cow. Quinn intends to milk it for all it’s worth.

Bush invites people to come to his party and tell tales about him. The tale we want to hear, though, is the old man’s own story – the secret that has been festering in his gnarled heart for four decades and caused him to shun his fellow human beings. There are two people from his past who may hold pieces of the puzzle. One is the recently widowed Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek), who has just returned to town. The other is Charlie Jackson (Bill Cobbs), a black reverend up in Illinois whom Bush wants to officiate at his funeral. (Jackson, like Quinn, is based on a real person.) The full reason for Bush’s self-exile won’t be revealed, though, until the man himself finally unbridles his tongue.

I don’t need to tell you that, ultimately, the old coot is revealed to be as decent and misunderstood as Boo Radley. But if Get Low is predictable dramatic fare, the acting makes for a tasty meal. The film not only provides a great role for Duvall, but a very good one for Murray, too.

Old acquaintance Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek) pays a visit to Bush in a scene from Get Low. (Sam Emerson/Sony Pictures Classics) In the past decade, Murray, who once dealt in coarse comedy (Caddyshack, Scrooged), has mellowed into a superb minimalist. In Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers he personified the jaded man who has it all and no longer cares. Here, as the tippling, dryly humorous Quinn, he’s jaded again, but his ennui is leavened by the hungry impulses of a born salesman. When he isn’t hitting the bottle or napping in the back of the hearse, Quinn boasts to Buddy about his glory days selling cars in Chicago and we see a flicker of the old fire that once drove him. There’s also a touch of the melancholy that Murray brought to the Coppola and Jarmusch films – although, for an undertaker, that may be a professional requirement.

The rest of the cast is fine, though Spacek, 60, is too young to be playing Duvall’s contemporary. (I still have a hard time thinking of the actress who played Carrie as a grandmother type.) As Buddy, Black supplies the movie with a youthful point of view. He’s also part of the Boo Radley continuum: he was the kid in 1996’s Sling Blade, Billy Bob Thornton’s homicidal variation on Radley – in which Duvall played the Thornton character’s father.

Get Low suffers from some elliptical moments and jarring edits (Schneider cut the film himself). But there are nice period details in Geoffrey Kirkland’s production design and a score that mixes 1930s gems by Bix Beiderbecke and The Ink Spots with Jan A.P. Kaczmarek’s elegiac strings and the bluegrass of Nashville band The SteelDrivers.

The band also appears onscreen in the funeral party scene, where the laconic Bush unburdens himself at last. Duvall, who has been slowly illuminating the different facets of the man, now reveals a new one: frustrated storyteller. Bush relates his life-scarring tragedy with growing animation, even resorting to sound effects, turning his catharsis into one humdinger of a tale. The irony isn’t lost on us: this sad old recluse has never been livelier than at his own funeral.

Get Low opens in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver on Aug. 6.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.