Shotgun Stories

Posted May 2, 2007
Shotgun Stories
Starring: Michael Shannon, Douglas Ligon, Barlow Jacobs
Director: Jeff Nichols

In this tumultuous age when Israeli-Palestinian conflict films have become — dare I say — fashionable, writer-director Jeff Nichols' unforgettable feature debut offers a richer illustration of both the futility and complexity of long-standing blood feuds than any suicide bomber film yet made. A fresh blossom in the wilting American indie film scene, Shotgun Stories isn't even set in the Middle East but amidst the sun-drenched cotton fields of southeast Arkansas, a sleepy Carver-esque region that pays no heed as it undulates to its own metronomic rhythms. This is the downbeat Southern ambiance explored regularly by filmmaker David Gordon Green (George Washington; All the Real Girls), who serves as producer and inspiration to Nichols. Both men are part of an up-and-coming film community launched from the North Carolina School of the Arts — including festival circuit names-to-know Nate Meyer (Pretty in the Face), Craig Zobel (the soon-to-be-released Great World of Sound), Zack Godshall (Low and Behold), and Aaron Katz (Quiet City).

When the deadbeat father who abandoned them dies, Son Hayes (Michael Shannon, proving a master of nuance) and his brothers Boy (Douglas Ligon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs) attend his funeral to curse his existence. Instead of catharsis, however, spitting on his grave only exacerbates a quarrel with their dad's second family — specifically, their four half-brothers. Near flawlessly unfolding in a series of sly, unpretentious reveals, the film keenly observes the cheerless monotony of their low-wage existences ("We don't own the square root of shit," decries one brother, matter-of-factly) with forceful breaks of eye-for-an-eye vengeance upon each other's clans. After tragedy strikes and Son confronts his mother about being raised to "hate those boys," we realize his understanding doesn't put him any closer to stopping it, and the weight is felt.

What could easily have been a modern-day hicksploitation thriller is rendered too sensitively to spell out why the situation is so heartbreaking; only the unfeeling would look on with patronizing detachment. (Boy is an overweight guy who lives in a van down by the river, and in the wrong hands, he could have been the embodiment of that old Chris Farley Saturday Night Live sketch.) Even the female characters, who at first glance, seem to be underwritten as background support, are only portrayed as such because of the film's statement on unwittingly tactless masculinity; watch as Kid only turns around to look at his approaching girlfriend when he hears she brought him a burger. Shotgun Stories may be the film to beat at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, an elegiac and exquisitely lensed portrait of buried resentment without a healthy outlet to vent.

— Aaron Hillis