That Evening Sun

Hal Holbrook's excellent, nuanced performance highlights That Evening Sun, an otherwise fair-to-good film that starts slowly but builds to a more complex finish than one might expect.

The film, written and directed by Scott Teems, is based on a short story, and it kind of shows, as the plot is pretty thin. Abner Meecham (Holbrook), glumly residing in a retirement home, packs his suitcase and walks out, intending to go back to his farm. When he gets there he's surprised to find that his son has rented it out; not only that, he's rented it a family presided over a long-time enemy (Ray McKinnon).

The first third of the film is very familiar territory--the old man who's been relegated to the ash heap but still wants to assert his independence. Holbrook really has only one goal in the film--he wants to regain his farm, which he repeatedly tells us he's worked long and hard on. McKinnon's character is something of a redneck slacker, who has been earning disability checks and has a history of not having a job. He does have a wife (Carrie Preston) and a teenage daughter (Mia Wasikowska), whom Holbrook has nothing against; in fact he comes to their aid when they are beaten by McKinnon with a garden hose.

It's only at about the half-way point that my interest got really focused, when both McKinnon and Holbrook's characters became more shaded. When I first read about this film I thought it sounded like David Lynch's The Straight Story, but Holbrook's character is not warm and twinkly like Richard Farnsworth's. He's really no better a person than McKinnon's drunken lout, and the stand-off that the two men have (Holbrook has resolutely moved into the sharecropper's cabin on the property) starts to take on a epic proportion.

Teems' best work as a director is creating the world of the film, which is set in rural Tennessee. Though almost all of the action takes place in the approximately fifty yards between the farmhouse and the cabin, it never seems confined, and we get the sense that the entire world is represented in that space. The film is a bit slowly paced, another result of being based on a story--there's a bit of padding here and there that could have been excised.

But the best reason to see this film is for Holbrook, who creates a vivid character and never has a moment of inauthenticity.