Ryan Adams requests, in the appropriately-titled "Tennessee Sucks," for "something blue to put us out of our way/'Cause Tennessee sucks in the summer." Roll credits on "That Evening Sun," an adaptation of a William Gay short story directed by Scott Teems and starring Hal Holbrook. The film insists upon a slow, deliberate pace throughout, highlighted by an understated score teeming with the sounds of Tennessee in the summer (13-year cicadas notwithstanding). This is a Southern movie-it's hard not to read into the land ownership conflict between Abner Meecham (Holbrook) and Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon). But there's something more to this story. It isn't a pure generational-conflict film, like say a "Gran Torino," but that element is certainly present. It's also not a story of redemption, or of good triumphing over evil. Because there is really no good or evil here. Audiences swaying their allegiance to Meecham immediately for being displaced by a boozing, wife-beating deadbeat who even "walks like white trash" (in the words of Meecham) will be discouraged by some of the revelations of the second half of the film.
This is really where Holbrook shines. He can at once make the audience believe that his claim to his family's farm is legitimate, and that his intentions for sticking around in the tenant cabin are just. At the same time, we can't completely dismiss his lawyer son's (played more-than-competently by Walter Goggins of "Justified" and "The Shield" fame) admission that his father was mean and ill-tempered with him, and with his wife. Whether as a consequence of the source material (I admit, I haven't read the short-story yet) or of Teems' directorial decision, some sympathy is introduced back into Meecham's character in the final act of the film, but this sympathy is immediately undermined by what amounts to be an apparent plot to win his farm back through drastic measures. Throughout all of these developments, Holbrook never allows us to believe that Meecham isn't simply human, reacting to a world that he cannot completely control anymore, no matter how much he'd like to. Meecham's stubbornness, like the Romantic vision of the Confederate soldier fighting for "state's rights" rather than to preserve the pernicious continuation of slavery, becomes his most endearing quality, and Holbrook comes through in spades portraying this flawed protagonist on-screen.
The subsequent performances are nothing to really write home about. Barry Corbin does an amusing turn as neighbor Thurl Chessor, similar in age and temperament to Meecham and thus providing another mouthpiece against the coming tide of modernism in the rural South. When Thurl admonishes to Abner that he should be proud of his son getting out of town and making something of himself, Abner tells us, "I am proud of him. There's a difference between leaving home and forgetting the place exists, though." Teems never lets the audience forget the beauty and majesty of the place Meecham seems to be protecting. The soundtrack and visuals all play into a Romanticized version of the rural South that persists even as the credits roll. You don't have to be from the South or have lived there for a time to appreciate the film, but it sure doesn't hurt.
For all that it does well, "That Evening Sun" ends without resolution. I'm sure that's part of Teems' point, and certainly is a component of the post-modern short story Gay wrote ten years ago, but it doesn't allow the film to really come to any sort of cogent conclusion. The audience is left with several characters we're not sure what to do with, and the dramatic action of the final thirty minutes of the film remains somehow detached from the rest of the film. Its implications are never fully explored. This may work in the shorts Teems directed before this feature-length debut, but it leaves this reviewer with the conclusion that Teems and Holbrook tell a very interesting story, but don't really take it anywhere.
Verdict: 3.5/5 stars
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