Hollywood, Full of Grace

by Kathryn Jean Lopez at HeadlineBistro.com

“There’s alive and there’s dead, and there’s a worse place in between them that I hope you never know nothing about.”

Felix Bush was “just going through the motions” of life for forty years. These words are his from the new movie Get Low, a gripping, raw, beautiful story of grace – a movie about the liberation that comes from confession and forgiveness.

Get Low is inspired by the life and legend of a Tennessee hermit named Felix “Bush” Breazeale who died at the turn of the 20th century. The movie is not explicitly Catholic. But no Catholic should walk away from it without a refreshed appreciation for the lifesaving gift of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

While the world will make of freedom what it may, we know true freedom is in Christ, made possible through His extraordinary mercy.

In Get Low, Hollywood seems to have a clue, too -- and with an all-star lineup, in fact, starring Robert Duvall and co-starring Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek.

The only mystery to me about Get Low is why friends aren’t urging – even begging – one another to see it. At another point in the movie, Duvall’s character heartbreakingly admits: “I was always restless. I didn’t go nowhere on purpose because I did something I was ashamed of. Something I could never fix.”

If he only knew he didn’t have to fix it himself! That he isn’t alone. Do we know this, ourselves? We forget, don’t we?

Likewise, during a dramatic graveyard scene that begins to reveal the depth of the prison Felix has let sin keep him in, he recalls the advice he’s frequently given: “They keep talking about forgiveness. ‘Ask Jesus for forgiveness.’”

He shakes his head in indignation masking a dangerous and deep flirtation with despair. “I never did nothing for him,” Felix protests in the voice of one desperately in need of God's mercy.

There are men like Felix Bush in your life who feel the same. There are mortal sins the world takes seriously and mortal sins the world tolerates, approves of, encourages, and outright revels in. Yet maybe even in that latter category, a man feels shame, even today, and even in the most sordid of contexts. Maybe he goes to church and sits in the back. Perhaps he overhears a preacher on radio now and again, catches EWTN late at night. But it makes no difference. He still keeps going through the motions in a life that isn’t quite lived in any way that would give him any sense of fulfillment, any sense that he is made for a greater purpose than the pain he now experiences. For him, forgiveness isn’t anything he deserves, so he will never seek it.

I don’t think I’ve met the person who has never hesitated to ask forgiveness because he did not deserve it. After all, we can never do for our Lord what He has done for us. But that’s the point -- that’s the glory of His extraordinary love, and that’s why we give our lives to Him. That’s why we seek His mercy always and live to be guided by His love. Anything less would be going through the motions -- maybe not as dramatically as in the life of Felix Bush, but to pretend that it’s all that different is delusion.

The movie revolves around Felix’s “living funeral,” an event he plans himself. As the preacher at the “funeral” says: “We like to imagine that good and bad and right and wrong are miles apart. But the truth is very often they are all tangled up with each other.” There’s more Felix Bush in most of us than we might care to admit.

Get Low isn’t the first movie I’ve seen in the past year that made me walk away checking Confession schedules. A little remarked-on moment in the movie The Blind Side was a beautiful example of the practice of examination of conscience. Sandra Bullock’s character turns to her husband and asks if she is a good person. She’s not looking for affirmation. She wants to make sure that her intentions are pure. And, as St. Teresa of Avila tells us time and again -- on nearly every page of her autobiography, it can seem like -- she knows the importance of having competent help in such a routine examination, a spiritual guide. Granted, The Blind Side isn’t a sacramental how-to, but the point of this scene is not far off from where we need to be every moment of our lives.

“I wish you peace from the burdens of your mind and heart, I wish it for us all,” says the Get Low preacher at the end of the movie. Through the sacramental prism of the Church’s liturgy, I heard: “Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ. For the Kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.”

Hollywood taps into something much bigger than the box office in Get Low. Grace certainly does abound.

(see the Kresta in the Afternoon interview with Robert Duval below)

Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a nationally syndicated columnist. She speaks frequently on faith and public life.