Reclaiming a Home at the Sunset of Life


Freestyle Releasing
Hal Holbrook as an 80-year-old farmer fighting for his property in
“That Evening Sun.”

In “That Evening Sun,” the story of a feisty Tennessee farmer who flees a nursing home to return to his rural homestead, where he discovers that another family has taken up residence, Hal Holbrook strips the stereotype of the grumpy old man of sentimental shtick and cutesy old-codger mannerisms.

His hard, steady glare conveys a bone-deep understanding of his thorny character, Abner Meecham, a lonely widower and self-described “80-year-old man with a bum hip and a weak heart.” Mr. Holbrook’s fierce, contained performance matches in depth and truthfulness his portrayal of a weary Army retiree who briefly becomes a surrogate father to Emile Hirsch’s survivalist in “Into the Wild.”

Abner’s life at his age revolves around the struggle between decrepitude and the determination of someone who feels free to shoot off his mouth because he has nothing left to lose; his quarrel with the world may in fact be his best survival strategy. Foolishly or not, Abner intends to spend his remaining days on the farm, which his son, Paul (Walton Goggins), a harried trial lawyer, leased to Lonzo Choat (Raymond McKinnon), a no-account 30-something local, after dispatching Abner to the nursing home.

Hard-bitten and judgmental, Abner isn’t especially likable. He has always loathed the Choat clan, which he denounces to Lonzo’s face as “white trash,” once he arrives to find his farm occupied. During Abner’s confrontations with his son, who urges him to return to the nursing home, we learn that Abner was a stern, withholding father and a difficult husband to his wife, Ellen (Mr. Holbrook’s real-life wife, Dixie Carter, shown in flashback sharing loving glances with him). When addressing younger people, he has the habit of beginning a sentence with, “The trouble with your generation. …”

Even though Abner is too enfeebled to manage the farm, he takes up residence in a sharecropper shack on the property, hoping that Lonzo, who subsists on disability payments from an accident involving falling lumber, won’t make enough money from the farm to exercise the purchase option in the lease agreement. Scenes of Lonzo and his wife, Ludie (Carrie Preston), arguing about money reveal the desperation of Lonzo’s circumstances.

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