Independent Film Festival Boston 2009

Thursday screening: Director Scott Teems in attendance.
Sunday screening: Director Scott Teems, actor Hal Holbrook, actor Barry Corbin in attendance.

-I hate to see
-That evening sun go down
-’Cause it makes me feel
-I’m on my last go-round.
-Traditional blues

Based on the eponymous short story by William Gay, a Tennessee native and the heir-apparent to the mantle of Southern Gothic literature, THAT EVENING SUN begins with an elderly man’s journey from an “old folks’ home” to the farmstead he left a few months previously. Upon his arrival, Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) finds that his son has leased the farm to Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon), a man Meecham considers good for nothing. If he was determined not to spend his last days in the sterile solitude of a nursing home, Meecham is even more determined that Choat and his family shall not inherit the yield of his years of hard work. When Meecham installs himself in the “tenant cabin” across from the main farmhouse, the antagonism between the two men––each of whom considers the other an interloper––threatens to boil into violence.

The atmospheric camerawork and unforced pacing give the film the ambling feel of an old yarn-spinner telling tales on the porch. The apparently placid surface is deceptive, though, and THAT EVENING SUN keeps the audience off-balance. Eschewing the visual dazzle and credulity-straining allegiance reversals of recent Hollywood thrillers, the film achieves a more potent effect with a clear-eyed focus on a handful of characters and a steadily unfolding revelation of their histories and motives. The web of relationships between the protagonists is drawn so taut by circumstance that any subtle shift in one component must ripple throughout the whole.

Holbrook and McKinnon anchor the story with strong performances. They represent flawed men unsentimentally, belligerent men without melodrama, and ultimately leave us uncertain as to where our sympathies should lie between two men so incompatible, yet both so tenaciously human.

- Kyle Parrish