Now available on DVD: "That Evening Sun"

That Evening Sun moves slowly, deliberately, like its lead character, Abner Meecham, a crusty old coot who escapes the old-folks home his son has put him in.

Played with exquisite skill by the sorely underrated Hal Holbrook, Abner lives his life in the same straightforward manner in which he executes his escape - by simply walking out the door.

He wants to go back to his Tennessee farm to live out the rest of his life, so he persuades the taxi driver who comes to deliver him back to the old-folks home to take him there. Once he arrives, however, he encounters a problem: Someone else is living there.

Abner's lawyer son, Paul (Walton Goggins), has leased the place to the Choats, for whom Abner has no use, and the old man is not shy about letting the family know it.

You even walk like it, he tells Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon).

Walk like what?

"White trash.

Abner is determined to get his home back, but for the time being, he has to settle for being a squatter in the sharecropper's shack out back. He's not happy there, and Lonzo's certainly not happy about him being there.

Lonzo's long-suffering wife, Ludie (Carrie Preston), is a little friendlier, while their daughter, Pamela (Mia Wasikowska), reaches out to Abner - he's a mean old goat; you get the sense that no one has made a friendly overture his way in a long time, so he's not quite sure how to respond.

Lonzo's a drunk, and a mean one. When Abner sees him whipping Ludie and Pamela with a garden hose one night, mad about a date Pamela has gone on, Abner's had enough. He fires a shot Lonzo's way and lets him know he'll be in touch with the sheriff the next morning.

From there, the movie is a test of wills between Abner and Lonzo. It takes a while for that to play out; this is the rural South, after all, so no one's in much of a hurry. The characters simply move forward, at their own pace, and there is a kind of nobility to that. Scenes in which Abner shoots the breeze with his neighbor Thurl (Barry Corbin) linger and are a treat. Just watching the two men drawl about life is time well spent.

Director Scott Teems, who also wrote the script, based on the short story by William Gay, finds some humanity in all the characters, even Lonzo, who indeed may seem like a lazy redneck. But there are reasons, and we see, in brief moments, how tortured he is - he's more self-aware than we realize.

The beauty of Holbrook's performance is that Abner is not a particularly likable character. He's not without a certain Southern charm, but he has a vindictive streak - as he tells Paul, he has never been one to let things lie, and that will cost him.

But we also recognize in him a real fear of losing his independence, his dignity, compounded by flashbacks of time spent with his wife (Holbrook's real-life wife, Dixie Carter).

There is a predictability to the story, but that's OK. The acting is superb, Holbrook in particular, making That Evening Sun an understated pleasure.