Yellowhammer Press

Like many of its fans, I first came across The Accountant after learning it was the inspiration for “Sinkhole,” a song by Athens, GA band The Drive-By Truckers.  I tracked down the film (no easy feat at the time — it’s a relatively  hard thing to get a hold of, especially now that the Ginny Mule Productions site seems to be down) and watched most of its slim 35 minutes with my jaw on the floor.  This film masterfully expresses something about the rural South that is so necessary, so utterly visceral, and yet something that is captured so rarely — that the disappearance of the family farm, the corporatization of food production in America, and the caricaturization of the  Southern farmer and his culture have acted in concert to destroy a way of life.  In short, it’s a movie about the end of a South in which small farmers are still financially viable and culturally necessary.

Now, I’ve made it sound like some ominous, doom-saying and finger-wagging slog that tolls the death knell for the rural South.  That’s far from the truth.  The Accountant is, at its core, a comedy.  Hell, it’s hilarious.  But as the old song goes, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.  The rural, small farming South is losing its once firm grip on its traditions, and has only itself to blame.  This very problem is embodied in the O’Dell brothers, one a strict traditionalist and fledgling farmer, the other a more progressive but not unsympathetic rationalist who seems to hold an ambiguous job in town.  Their family farm is in danger of falling into bankruptcy, and the accountant sees only one very macabre solution to its financial woes.

Ray McKinnon (you may know him from Deadwood or O Brother!) wrote, directed, and starred in what would win the Oscar for Best Live Action Short in 2002.  With his wife, Lisa Blount, Ray runs Ginny Mule Pictures, an entity about which there is frustratingly little information available online.  Other work by the same production team has been less successful — Chrystal, a dreary but highly watchable drama (worth seeing if only for Lisa Blount’s singing) and the recent and decidedly less ambitious Randy and the Mob – but a new film, That Evening Sun, based on a William Gay short story, seems promising.

The Accountant is a comedy.  It’s also exceptionally tragic.  The characters (there are only 3 in the entire film) are forced to watch their culture crumble around them and are powerless to respond, save the palpable but impotent rage that permeates the entire film.  It’s as maddening as it is hilarious.