(2009) "Yes, I hate to see that evening sun go down" - based on William Gay's short story (title taken from lyrics to W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues"), director/screenwriter Scott Teems also includes a few of Jimmie Rodgers's Blue Yodel songs in the soundtrack - "'Cause it makes me feel I'm on my last go 'round."

After spending three months in the old folks home in Linden, Tennessee, 80-year-old, cantankerous Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) takes his cane, pocket watch, and suitcase with him out the door. When a taxi (with "Jesus saves receipts Fat girls ride free" on the back window) comes after him to take him back, Abner offers to pay the young cabbie $25 for a ride to his farm outside of Ackerman's Field. There unexpectedly he finds 16-year-old Pamela Choat (Mia Wasikowska) sunbathing: "Why are you here?"

She says her parents, Lonzo (Ray McKinnon) and Ludie (Carrie Preston), are renting the place with an option to buy from his son Paul (Walton Goggins), a lawyer. Determined to stay - "This is my place" - Abner moves into the sharecropper cabin, taking his stand against the no-good, redneck, white-trash Lonzo, who's equally opposed to having a crazy old coot on the property: "This is my land now."

Over at neighbor Thurl Chesser's place Abner uses the phone (the Choats can't afford telephone service) to call his son, who's his legal guardian and trustee of the estate. Abner also offers to buy Thurl's old Cherokee (since Thurl can no longer drive) and a yapping mutt (Pamela has informed him that her daddy doesn't like barking dogs), which he names Nipper.

Among his possessions, which have been stored in the shack, he finds a pistol and ammunition. Stopping by to unburden herself of secrets, Pamela, the only likeable character in this sad story, feels free to say to Abner whatever she's thinking. He tells Nipper that after he'd fallen and broken his hip last December, he found he could no longer tend to the farm; lonely (his wife has passed on eight years earlier) and in pain, with "a bum hip and weak heart," he'd agreed to his son's urging him to move into the assisted-living facility.

Awakened at night by a commotion outside the shack - Lonzo's whomping on Pamela's date with a garden hose and then swings it at her and her mother - Abner fires his gun in the air and then at Lonzo's feet to end the drunken man's frenzy. Unemployed for the past ten years following a serious injury on a job, Lonzo and his family have been dependent on disability checks, which he's exhausted; without a fresh income, he'll be unable to make the next payment on the lease and lose his investment in the farm.

Defending Lonzo to Abner, Ludie says, on her way to bail her husband out of jail with money they can ill-afford to lose, he's made improvements: "I wish you had something better to do with your life than sittin' around being bitter and lonely."

To Paul, who wants his father to return to the old folks home before something terrible happens, Abner says that after he'd made sacrifices so that Paul could receive an expensive education it's now "God's finest joke" that his son's using the gift of knowledge against him; Paul informs Abner (who has tender dreams about his patient wife) that he had been mean as father and husband.

There's bad blood between an obstinate Abner and a desperate Choat feeling at bay, and a bad moon's rising.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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