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That Evening Sun Reviews
One of the slowest moving, uninteresting films ever. Hal Holbrook must be ashamed for having taken part in this loser.
I'm a big Hal Holbrook fan (his Mark Twain show was great), but thought Ray McKinnon did a nice job in this movie, as well.
An excellent film that gives a great actor his proper due. Writer/Director Scott Teems gives an interesting look into relationships and what it means to be neighbors. An engrossing dark Southern drama.
Although William Faulkner wrote a memorable short story which shares the title of this movie, the film is actually based on a story by William Gay called, "I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down." I have not read Gay's story; nevertheless, I feel comfortable guessing that like so many movies based on literary works, the power of the original story came from the inner life and thoughts of the protagonist and supporting characters. Simply watching the actions of the actors play out onscreen becomes an empty exercise when you don't know what they are thinking and where they have been. I can certainly understand why Hal Holbrook took the part. In the role of Abner Meecham, Holbrook gets to inhabit a haunted character whose present and future are such that even a past full of regrets and mistakes becomes food for nostalgia. But we only get glimpses of who this character really is; this is also true to Meecham's nemesis, Lonzo Choat. This is a problem. The success of these types of stories where strong characters go head-to-head and there is no room for compromise, it is vital that the audience becomes invested in the characters. And considering that the elderly Meecham is a widower with a disloyal son who has forced him to move into a nursing home after secretly selling the old man's beloved farm, Meecham instantly becomes the underdog we want to root for. But the title of the movie isn't, "An Unexpected Triumph." And since we understand that the main character is fighting a losing battle, it becomes unbearable to think that Choat, the stereotypical Southern "white trash" slightly sadistic drunk, is going to win. At this point, sitting through the movie can seem masochistic: there has to be a payoff. We need to be surprised by the characters: not by whatever shocking actions they may take out of desperation (too predictable) but by their humanity, pathos, and whatever humanity they have left.
[Holbrook is] wonderful. 22 5 2013
A so-so story of a cranky old man wanting to take back his farmland from a "white trash" family whose patriarch has a bad reputation. Acting was fine, but the story line is not quite the best.
Deserving of way more attention when it came out 2010. Great to see Hal Holbrook give such a good performance and have the lead in such a terrific movie this late in his career. This following his Oscar nomination for Into the Wild. I was lucky enough to see him live in his one man Mark Twain performance over 10 years ago in Idaho Falls. From All the President's Men in 1976 to Lincoln in 2012 he's had an amazing career. Don't miss this movie. It's really good.
Leisurely-paced, with a fine performance from Holbrook.
3.5 to be exact - it wasn't that bad - but I must admit there were pints where i did want to fast forward to something more up and at you.
This movie came from nowhere. Its a little middle-American indie film that I had never heard of until I saw it advertised on my upcoming orders list. I just finished watching it and it is a fantastic character study. It stars Hal Holbrook in one of the finest performances in his long and successful career. He plays an old man who walks out of his nursing-home and returns to the farm he owned for over 50 years only to find it occupied by new tenants. Being stubborn he squats in the old worker's quarters and wages a personal war against the new family. From there the film becomes a real examination of this old man's mind. He is at the narrow end of life and has nothing to show for it. Everything he knew was taken away and he is doomed to live the rest of his life with regret about many things in his life. Unbeknownst to him, much of his traits are reflected in his newly appointed enemy. Its a slow drama with moments of tension. The performances are exceptional and the relationship he has with his old neighbour is wonderful (some of the best scenes). Well worth a look.
Poignant, surreal and absolutely beautiful. Hal Holbrook is the most believable actor I have seen to date. This film is a must see.
A steady but overlong drama about an aging farmer trying to reclaim his home. Worth seeing for Hal Holbrook's performance.
At about the 30 minute mark you realize, there is nowhere else for this story to go. The characters are set in stone, you know how it will end and from then on you lose interest. The acting across the board is very good and that's about the only thing that keeps your eyes on the screen. While Holbrook is very good, this isn't a career defining, tour de force type performance that some have made it out to be.
Holbrook's performance is wonderful, even if the film in the end leads him to a desperate act that's a bit too literary for belief.
holbrook io awesome in this should have been oscar nominated 4 this as a man fighting 4 his farm. here's the formula: fried green tomatoes+ the whales of august- the ladies= this one.
That Evening Sun is an absolutely excellent, authentic, and thought provoking drama. The script was top notch, and so was the cast, lead by Hal Holbrook who was tremendous. All of the characters were decidedly realistic and fleshed out. What I really loved about the film was the flawed nature of both the protagonist and the antagonist, this isn't a simple morality tale, it's a true character study that treats people as complex and multi-faceted. This, in addition to its' tense deliberate pacing and beautiful cinematography, make it a powerfully moving film.
I wanted to like this film more, and I even had set my expectations low so I *could* like it as much as I wanted to. Yet, I gave it three stars--all for its craftsmanship--and no additional stars, because it lacked the beauty that I was watching for. While Holbrook's performance was astounding IMO (although I can't shake the sense that has has begun estrogen injections in the scenes with Dixie Carter--that might be the fault of the make-up artist), I suppose the one thing his character's development lacked was a sense of peace, which in the end seemed more like resignation. That alone was enough to make the movie less than memorable for me. The daughter was overly precocious, or perhaps not precocious enough for a 16-year-old. Ray McKinnon's character was villainous or tragic, I don't know which, but gave me no reason for empathic identification. The redeeming quality was direction and cinematography (and writing/dialogue wasn't bad, though it had two or three endings). The scene of the tenant's house burning recalled nicely the burning scene of 'Days of Heaven,' which I have lately been thinking about with Malick's new film coming out. Teems did a good job overall. I'm excited by his work. But this movie was a downer, and that's probably why it didn't do more in theaters.
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.