That Evening Sun

Directed by Scott Teems (2009) ****

That Evening Sun, based on a short story by southern novelist William Gay, confidently and quietly opens with our protagonist, widowed Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) in a prison of sorts: a nondescript nursing community. While the other residents seem content to crochet and put puzzles together, Abner is bored, antsy, increasingly restless. The viewer can see trees reflected on the outside of his apartment window, but from the inside Abner’s view is mainly an adjoining brick wall. He finally decides to leave, packing a small case and walking away onto the main country road.

When the facility pays a driver to track him down and return him, Abner pays the driver a higher sum to drive him to his old farm home (the tale takes place in Tennessee). He’s surprised to find there a family laying claim to his land: Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 2000), who Abner remembers as a redneck lay-about; Lonzo’s more practical wife, Ludie (Carrie Preston, of The Good Wife) and their teenage daughter, Pamela (Mia Wasikowska, of Alice in Wonderland, 2010). It’s revealed that Abner’s son, Paul (Walton Goggins), a busy lawyer who has legal jurisdiction over Abner’s affairs, has leased the farm to the Choats, with an option for them to buy if Lonzo can gather the down payment in time. Unwilling to give up his land, and unable to contact Paul, Abner holes himself inside a ramshackle tenant shack on the farm (which he had refused to rent to Lonzo many years back), filled with stacks of his old belongings. Lonzo won’t allow him to see the inside of the house.

Thus begins a uniquely gothic, uniquely Southern tale, at turns funny, wry, smart and dramatic, but rarely if ever melodramatic. The pacing is contemplative, never hurried. Abner is the sort of thoughtful, willfully determined coot you can’t help but root for, and Lonzo is the sort of hot-headed yahoo you suspect will never be a success. As the plot progresses, though, the viewer nearly begins to feel sympathy for where Lonzo has found himself in life and more worried for Ludie and Pamela, whose prospects are tied to Lonzo for good or ill. Meanwhile, Abner’s complicated and mostly adversarial relationship with his son, Paul, reveals that Abner was a less than present and understanding father and husband. The lives of these five people are awkwardly intertwined. Pamela brings food to Abner in the evenings and their conversations are almost father/daughter-like.

Before the tension takes a more serious turn, Abner discovers Lonzo hates the sound of dogs barking and so borrows a neighbor’s dog, which Abner teaches to bark all the more when he tells the dog to “hush”. Though not allowed inside the main house, his dreams take him there, where his wife (played by Holbrook’s real wife, actress Dixie Carter) still lives. These scenes are meditative and calming. Hal Holbrook was one of America’s finest actors, a powerful combination of talent and integrity and character. You can’t take your eyes off him. The scenes of him and Dixie (the first time they played together in a film) are especially wistful; she died of cancer a year after That Evening Sun was filmed.

Director/writer Scott Teems (this was, remarkably, his first feature film) hired Goggins and McKinnon based on the strength of two earlier films they had made together, The Accountant and Chrystal, which Teems considered “beautifully authentic Southern films.” Goggins co-produced That Evening Sun and appeared in it just before his first episodes as Boyd Crowder in Justified.

That Evening Sun, already a poignant story, is more so when you consider it was one of the last of its kind. Independently made and distributed fifteen years ago, it’s unlikely the film would be made or distributed today. It’s not a superhero movie, or a horror movie, not a sequel, not based on a toy or game or any other franchise. It’s not a feel-good movie, or an action movie or a kid’s movie. The sun is setting on any films not in those categories.

That Evening Sun was released by Image Entertainment, on DVD and Blu-ray; the Blu-ray, at least, features hours of extras, including a director’s commentary and podcast of interviews.

—Michael R. Neno, 2024 August 18