Robert Duvall is at his best in ‘Get Low’

"Get Low" is the kind of valedictory movie that a few lucky actors find at the end of a great career.

In this case the actor is Robert Duvall (incredibly, he's nearly 80 years old), and it's good enough to make us hope, somehow, that Duvall has many more in store.

Duvall is completely at home and in the zone in "Get Low" as Old Man Bush, a Great Depression hermit in the Georgia hills, shrouded in legend, who abruptly ends a life of seclusion and announces to stunned locals that he wants to pay for, and attend, his own funeral.

It's an unusual request, but one enthusiastically honored by a hard-up funeral director (Bill Murray), who dispatches his assistant (Lucas Black) to attend to the old man's eccentric wishes.

One wish is that a lottery be held for his wooded property, another is that everyone who has a story to tell about him be permitted to do so at the service.

Bush has his own story to tell - the mystery at the source of his 50-year exile in the mountains - a secret known only to Bush, to an old flame (Sissy Spacek) and to an old preacher (Bill Cobbs) who lives in a nearby town.

The divulging of this secret is a little anticlimactic, but that in no way diminishes the considerable pleasure of watching "Get Low," very much a movie about the narrative journey.

It's unusually well written by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, and beautifully performed by Duvall, Spacek, Murray and Cobbs. And I've liked Black in these backwoods roles since "Sling Blade" - the accent comes naturally to him.

"Get Low," although shot for not much money, has a nice sense of place and period (Murray tools around in a fantastic old hearse). It's a piece of charming, low-key Americana that fills the same cultural niche as last year's "Crazy Heart," which co-starred Duvall, and features "Crazy Heart" director Scott Cooper (a close friend of the actor) in a small role as one of Bush's tormentors.

Most of all, "Get Low" has Duvall, a versatile performer who made his bones with "The Godfather," but who has come to excel at embodying the lives and mannerisms of country people. He is an invaluable and probably irreplaceable asset to American movies. We will always have his work available to us, but not always the kick of seeing a new performance. Now's your chance.