Shotgun Stories is an indie film written and directed by Jeff Nichols. The writer/director of commercially successful Mud makes his debut with this film. Son Hayes (Michael Shannon), Boy Hayes (Douglas Ligon), and Kid Hayes (Barlow Jacobs) are residents of a small town in Arkansas. They were born to a mother that had hate rooted in her heart and were left by their father who started a new life and a new family in the same town. The film escalates when Son Hayes shows up with his brothers at the funeral of his father and has words about the true nature the man who died. Mark Hayes (Travis Smith), one of the oldest of the Hayes father's new family takes immediate offense and plans retaliation on Son, Boy, and Kid. The film tells the story of the subsequent events that takes place between the two families and the resulting despondency. This small film has a lot more depth than what appears to be the surface. It tells the story of families living in a part of America where few get to see. The struggles and emotions these families experience are expertly conveyed by the film. The cinematography and the score are an excellent supplement to the story. Save this film for a time when you're feeling up to watching a story that will leave you thinking about it for a long time after you view it.

Southern American culture is rich in storytelling tradition and part of that is the story of the blood feud. But Shotgun Stories is not about those ancient yokels, the Hatfields and the McCoys, but contemporary families in rural Arkansas.One father, two wives. Two sets of sons. With first wife, father was an alcoholic ne'er to do well who abused his wife. The boys by this wife are poor. He cleaned up his act when he ran off with this second wife and became a farmer. The sons by this wife are middle class. The sets of sons hate each other. The father dies. At his funeral, his first set of sons shows up, brazenly unkempt to spite the well-dressed second set of sons. The oldest makes a speech condemning the father for abandoning them, then spits on the casket. A fist fight breaks out. Vengeance is sworn.And so the movie begins. And blood is shed.The information above about family history does not emerge all at once. Bits are doled out as we get to know the Hayes family, the sons, their wives and girlfriends, friends (some, like Shampoo, disreputable) and their children. An often unmoving camera fixes on the details on these young men's lives, especially the older ones, Son, Kid and Boy (Yes, that's their names).Just about everybody in the movie has known each other since childhood.This is not a fast-paced movie, but the tension builds to almost unbearable levels as retribution leads to worse retribution. Interestingly, the most serious violence occurs off camera. Eventually, a peacemaker emerges in a most unlikely (but maybe not) persona.Shotgun Stories is the kind of movie film festival goers adore. Low budget. Unknown actors. Local color. Rich dialogue. Evocative cinematography.If that's not your bag, stay away. But if it intrigues you, check this out.

"Blockbusters have become the laugh track to our national experiment. The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring, for they ratify for the viewer the presence of a repressive mechanism and offer momentary reprieve from anxiety with this thought: 'Enough money spent can cure anything. You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting two hundred million dollars on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody.' " – David Mamet "And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him." - Genesis, 4:8"Shotgun Stories" was the debut of director Jeff Nichols. The film merges Greek Tragedy (specifically King Lear) with the Southern Gothic genre, but is most interesting for the way it knowingly opposes or subverts traditional Hollywood action-movie mechanics.The plot? A feud erupts between Son, Boy and Kid (those are their names in the film - the plot functions on a purely stripped down, archetypal level) and their four half-brothers. Why they're fighting is not important. Nichols is more interested in chartering both the irrational escalation of violence between the two groups of men, and his audience's predisposition to expecting or desiring violence as a form of conflict resolution.Like a tale torn from the pages of the Old Testament, the film makes references to serpents, blind men, Cain and Abel, divided bloodlines, warring sons, kins, familial bonds and masculine heartache. There's therefore an almost Biblical portentousness to the film. It stars Michael Shannon as Son, the tragic, moral centre of the picture. Shannon's body, riddled with shotgun wounds, suggests learnt rationality and an almost preternatural wisdom borne of past pain. But though he possesses an intelligence and foresight which allows him to see where the film's cycle of violence will end, he is ultimately unable to escape the film's bloody vortex."An eye for an eye leaves us all blind" and "violence begets violence" are common sentiments found in "revenge movies" (and westerns, which the film resembles), but Nichols goes several steps further. He shows the film's violence to be self-perpetuating, short circuits his audience's expectations by constantly cutting away from cathartic violence, forces his audience to question its own programmed behaviour and constructs his tale such that both audience and cast must "outgrow" their basest instincts if they are to "mature". Bizarrely, while Nichols constantly undermines audience expectations, "Shotgun" feels more violent than your typical action movie.Interesting scenes abound: one brother comments that their ghost town feels like it belongs to them whilst another points out that if he owned it, he would "sell this worthless place". The brother's are at once kings and rats, royalty and the forgotten. But the emotional and psychological heft that Nichols injects into these supposedly "smaller moments" is remarkable. From grabbing cards to dismantling a tent, the film's narrative gradually tightens. Rather than build toward violence, though, Nichols structures the film as a series of increasingly contemplative scenes. What you respond to, what you're shocked by, is the sheer weight of each violent contemplation. As in classic Greek tragedy, a Jester or Fool character exists to relate information to the principals. Here the film's unwitting provocateur is a one eyed guy called Shampoo, through whom the film's events spiral out of control, catastrophe literally organically sprouting from a kind of blindness or myopia.Films typically highlight acts of violence whilst underplaying the consequences of violence. Nichols inverts this. Just as it appears as though a character is about to suffer a traumatic injury, Nichols deprives the viewer of the actual image, the certain act. In one climactic moment, just as the viewer has been offered enough visual information to ascertain precisely what is about to occur, Nichols sagely cuts to black. Of course revenge and action tales (even films which purport to be "anti violence", "Unforgiven" for example, a late western) secretly relish violence. Such violence is always treated as an antidote, purgative, underlined and served up as a form of catharsis. But Nichols seems repulsed by the concept of violence being cinematically fetishized, preferring instead to linger on the toll with a sad heart.Truffaut once said that no film which featured war could ever be considered truly antiwar. Cinema has a way of making everything about life, particularly violence, exhilaratingly delirious (even sexual; violence and sex occupy the same space). But time and time again, Nichols denies his audience the catharsis that his on screen characters actively seek. In other words, what the audience is denied and called to meditate upon is precisely which the characters are unable to deny and objectively meditate upon. What we are denied is the very cause of the film's violence.Beyond this, the film is almost sublime in the way it conveys an air of total waste and senselessness. Conversely, it seems as though the prospect of violence is all that can lift these perpetually morose and spiritually exhausted characters out of their squalor and/or apathy. Watch too how Nichol's writes his female characters. They exist firmly outside of the boy's story - in another genre and another world itself - unable to fathom the roiling testosterone. And of course you can extrapolate much more. One can look, for example, at one of the son's actions, his desire to fight, as an attempt to escape the futility of his abysmal life by choosing a pathway to glorified suicide. Likewise, the film's inter-familial war is akin to certain recent global conflicts, unrepairable damage always escalating from a certain point which, when viewed in hindsight, is usually very petty. Incidentally, the film was produced by David Gordon Green, a friend of Nichols. Green is heavily inspired by Terrance Malick, who would produce one of Green's own films. All three directors started off in the Southern Gothic genre. 9/10 - Worth two viewings.

I must start by explaining the summary comment. I put this in the DVD at 11:30pm after watching the Superbowl and doing the required beer drinking that goes with that. I was pretty sure I would be re-watching "Shotgun Stories" in the morning as I planned to fall asleep. I was amazed that a very slow moving, no real action to speak of movie did such a great job of keeping my interest up. Kicked it out of the DVD at 1:00am, reminded myself to find out who the star was and see what else he had been in since I do not remember him from anything. Michael Shannon is a great friggin actor. I had no interest at all in "Revolutionary Road" but will see it now just to watch his Oscar nominated work."Shotgun Stories" is well worth the hour and a half. You may find yourselves waiting for something big to happen and then realize it did without the gun play or explosions.