‘Shotgun Stories’ | 3 stars
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star
Early in Jeff Nichols’ “Shotgun Stories” the three Hayes brothers — Son (Michael Shannon), Boy (Douglas Ligon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs) — test a window air conditioner. They run an extension cord from their house to the backyard picnic table on which the big appliance sits.
Boy flips the switch, and frigid air begins pouring out. The brothers are so impressed that they pull up lawn chairs and plop down in the cool slipstream. It’s as if these yahoos are trying to air condition the whole humid state of Arkansas.
That moment of deadpan comedy is typical of “Shotgun Stories” (it opens today at the Screenland Crossroads), which views both absurdity and tragedy with a coolly dispassionate eye.
The film has a Southern Gothic sensibility like something out of Flannery O’Connor — if Flannery O’Connor had spent her life gargling cheap off-brand beer and scratching her nether regions.
As the film begins Son’s wife has left him, meaning he can now invite his siblings to stay in the house. Up to this point Boy has been living out of his van, while Kid sleeps in a tent. The three are ambitionless citizens of White Trash Nation, though the pudgy Boy harbors vague dreams of becoming a basketball coach.
Word arrives that their father has died. The old man abandoned these three 20 years earlier (heck, he didn’t even give them real names) to marry a Christian lady for whom he sobered up and with whom he had four more boys.
Son, Boy and Kid crash the graveside service. Son denounces their father, concluding his angry eulogy by spitting on the casket.
This doesn’t sit well with their four half-brothers (Michael Abbott Jr., Travis Smith, Lynsee Provence, David Rhodes), who remember the old man as a loving and devoted fellow.
Over the next few days the two tribes will exchange insults, brawl in the streets of their podunk town and finally pick up shotguns — and a very large rattlesnake. Not everyone will survive.
At times this Hatfield-and-McCoy feud takes on the trappings of Greek tragedy — violence driven by bitterness, futility and a sense of inevitability.
Writer/director Nichols employs a minimalist palette, using little dialogue. Important events take place just off camera. The film is marked by stationary shots and unhurried, even languid, editing. The flat Arkansas cotton country becomes a character in its own right — weirdly beautiful despite its unremarkability.
This low-key yarn about lowbrow men isn’t for everyone. But whatever its faults and limitations, “Shotgun Stories” casts a spell unlike any other movie we’ve seen in ages. And in the end Nichols gives his uneducated characters a great gift — he allows them a bit of dignity.
Mark the name of Jeff Nichols … we’ll be hearing from him.
‘SHOTGUN STORIES’ ★★★
Director: Jeff Nichols
Cast: Michael Shannon, Douglas Ligon, Barlow Jacobs
Rated: PG-13 for violence, thematic elements and brief strong language
Running time: 1:32
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