That Evening Sun, adapted from the William Gay short story “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down,” finds aging farmer Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) at war with a violent redneck named Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon). After packing Abner off to a retirement home, his son Paul (Walton Goggins) rents his sprawling farm to the drunk and vicious Choat.  Abner returns home to find his beloved farmstead taken over by the Choat family (played exceptionally by Carrie Preston and Mia Wasikowska).  Unable to regain his farm by legal means, Abner wages a quiet war of wits with the Choate family.

Admittedly, the film leans heavily on a performance by Hal Holbrook that is generating some Oscar buzz already.  His performance alone, portraying a Depression-era farmer at the end of his days, embattled with a redneck squatter as well as his only son make That Evening Sun worth seeing.  As subtle as it is powerful, Holbrook’s performance doesn’t prop up the film so much as it does steer it; That Evening Sun is written and directed well enough not to ask Holbrook to carry it on his back.  Instead, the rest of the film seems to orbit his performance, the other characters darting in and out between brief flashbacks of his youth.

Of course, no review of a movie about the South would be complete without a check of the accents.  Holbrook, McKinnon, and Goggins are all bona fide Southerners, so their accents were natural and without issue.  I’m happy to report that both Carrie Preston and Mia Wasikowska delivered expertly, without a single tinge of Dukes of Hazard.

That Evening Sun is in theaters in limited release.

The Southern tradition certainly bears its share of the guilt.  It’s easy enough to play those same 3 chords over and over and grind out South-as-genre work until the cows come home.  The recent SIBA awards list bears this out — though there are rare moments of masterful literary fiction like Ron Rash’s Saints at the River (even this is hardly his best work), most of it is treacly, sappy pap like Marley and Me or Because of Winn Dixie.  Good God.

So what is the current state of Southern lit?  Let’s consider 3 prevalent archetypes:

Trendy scholarship: dime-a-dozen academic work obsessed with race, class, and violence.  It paints the South’s white population with the broad brush of guilt and regards Southernness as a kind of pathology to be studied and eradicated like a communicable disease.  But for the moment, let’s discount academia.  Its motivations are clear enough.  I spent long enough inside it to see the man behind the curtain — class issues never go out of style in academia, but violence and trauma are all the rage and the American South is a convenient and plentiful source.  The victims and perpetrators are clearly delineated and the least amount of thought is required to churn out something tenure-worthy.

Absurd nostalgia: cutesy, South-as-genre work with all the trimmings.  Familiar tropes here are the placid simplicity of country life, the superior values of the pre-industrial South, and that the South never was all that racist to begin with and everyone’s just exaggerating.  Nostalgia for the Old South began almost as soon as the Old South itself had ended.  One of the earliest perpetrators was Thomas Nelson Page, who once declaimed that the Old South was “the purest, sweetest life ever lived” and that it “made men noble, gentle, and brave and women tender and pure.”  This, of course, is utter bullshit but it sold like hotcakes in the wake of Reconstruction as Southerners looked for a Golden Age on which to cling in order to maintain identity in the tumult of the South’s rapid industrialization.   Sadly, it didn’t end there.  C. Vann Woodward noted that the New South’s “most significant invention” was the Old South, and what an enduring invention it was.  We are still bombarded with antebellum romance, as well as nostalgia pieces reaching throughout the early to mid 20th century.  Think Fried Green Tomatoes.*

Lampoon: Ah, this old chestnut.  Some hapless out-of-towner lands in some small Southern burg. Hijinks ensue.  The South itself is a foil, and the locals enjoy having puckish fun at the confused (usually northern) traveler.  The reverse is also prevalent;  a Southerner finds himself elsewhere and completely incapable of acclimating.  As Ray McKinnon in The Accountant says, “Gomer, Goober, Cletus, Enos, Jethro, Ellie May, Billy Bob?  Don’t insult my intelligence.”  The list of dim-witted, slow speaking Southerners in literature and film is endless and shows no signs of abating.

The intention of this post is not to enumerate the ways in which the South abashes itself literarily, but rather to ask “why do we keep doing it?”  Certainly, it’s profitable.  People find some measure of comfort or romance in the Old South, despite its heavily constructed identity and this is mostly harmless.  Similarly, people enjoy laughing at the dimwitted hillbilly or the unschooled redneck.  The problem here is that South-as-genre work is no more reflective of the actual South than the Dukes of Hazard (filmed in California, of course).   The plantations are long gone.   The internet et al has done more to homogenize the US than Reconstruction ever dreamed of.  There are no more country stores,  no more old men playing checkers and going on about the weather.  There are strip malls and interstate highways. There is Applebees and Target.

The South that South-as-genre fiction describes no longer exists.  And yet Southerners are complicit in its creation, reveling in both the glorification and humiliation that it brings.  Why?  I suspect the answer is very simple: we wish it did exist and genre fiction, no matter how poorly done, can resurrect it, if only momentarily.

*I quote here from James Cobb’s Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.

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.