Verdict
Summary
A forty-minute short film that behaves as if it’s a feature with a stinging commentary about southern folk and humble farmers, Ray McKinnon’s Oscar-winning film The Accountant has a remarkable sense of time and place, almost feeling like a real-life fairy tale with its melancholy beauty and sadness that envelops the soul. There’s a good reason why this won best short film at the Oscars, and McKinnon showed a masterful hand at narrative and composition.
Plot:
Two siblings who are about to lose their inheritance call a shifty accountant to move around some numbers.
Review:
The O’Dell farm is a beautiful spread that seems to go on as far as the eye can see, but the home where Tommy (Walton Goggins) and David (Eddie King) live in has become a dilapidated ruin, in grave disrepair. It is David who inherited the place, and not Tommy, and under David’s reign, the O’Dell farm is about to be foreclosed on, with more than two hundred thousand dollars in debt to the bank, with a second mortgage they can’t possibly pay. They get desperate and call in an accountant (played by Ray McKinnon, who also wrote and directed), who shows up in an ancient car with a fierce ability to shift numbers around and who has an appetite for beer, preferably PBR. After assessing the O’Dell dilemma and spending the day calculating numbers in his head, he lays it on as he sees it: Unless the O’Dell brothers take drastic measures, such as engineering a disaster such as a fire or a death amongst them (for insurance), they will surely lose the farm. What happens next is either grace or damnation for the brothers as they make a pact with the accountant.
A forty-minute short film that behaves as if it’s a feature with a stinging commentary about southern folk and humble farmers, Ray McKinnon’s Oscar-winning film The Accountant has a remarkable sense of time and place, almost feeling like a real-life fairy tale with its melancholy beauty and sadness that envelops the soul. There’s a good reason why this won best short film at the Oscars, and McKinnon showed a masterful hand at narrative and composition.
Lightyear has just released a Blu-ray (newly restored from the elements) of The Accountant as a standalone disc, but the film in its entirety is also included on Lightyear’s simultaneous release of McKinnon’s feature Randy and the Mob, so the choice is yours.
