Shotgun Stories

Rating:

“Shotgun Stories” effectively taps into that vein of storytelling and sense of place that served authors like Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor so well.   For some reason, if you want to play out a Grecian tragedy in America, the best place to set your story is the Deep South.  

An old man dies, leaving behind two families – one from before he traded the bottle for Jesus, and one from after.   The sons from that first, miserable union show up at the funeral to tell everyone what’s what.   “You think that’s a good man laying there,”  one of them says.   “Well, it isn’t.”   And then he spits on the grave.  

Which, understandably, the other set of brothers doesn’t take too kindly to.   And this is where things really feel like high drama, Greek tragedy: the heads of each family doesn’t really want the feud, but doesn’t know how to end it, either.   Pride is at stake.  And brotherhood, and dignity.   Someone dies on both sides, and that just adds fuel to the fire.   It takes an incredible act of courage on the part of one brother to bring things to an end, and even then you wonder if this peace will last.   The movie lets you wonder.   It wants you to wonder.  

There are moments when “Shotgun Stories”  veers terribly close to rednexploitation (think “Ricky Bobby” and Jeff Foxworthy’s routines) but wisely pulls back, showing that what you might think is funny is just normal for these guys.  They take their dates to the buffet for a special night.   They live in vans down by the river, and work to make air conditioners run off of car batteries (blenders, too, in which they mix margaritas.)   But they’re real people nonetheless, and they worry about how they’re going to pay the bills, if they’ve got what it takes to get married and take care of somebody, and how to deal with the myriad wounds that have been delivered to them throughout their lives.  

Michael Shannon got an Oscar nomination for his electric performance in “Revolutionary Road,”  and he is just as good, though entirely different, in “Shotgun Stories.”   It’s really up to the actors to keep this material from veering into dark comedy and parody, and Shannon leads the way with his commitment to his character.   “Shotgun Stories” is dark, and funny at times, but thanks to Shannon and the actors around him, its overall tone is tragedy, not parody.