The brothers are united
an old Chinese proverb says that "when a man prepares a revenge, first dig two graves." This appointment fits like ring the finger for a movie like Shotgun Stories, the debut of young director Jeff Nichols. However, unlike the Dionysian feast often commonly referred ofrecérsenos in revenge movies (either from any movie acted by Charles Bronson to I spit in your grave -close to being brought back to the movies, going through Kill Bill, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance or Straw Dogs), violence Shotgun Stories circulating another record. Rather than violence, which is in the film is tragedy, tragedy understood in the academic sense, because what we see from the beginning is an invisible engine, the style of Greek theater, which inevitably leads the characters to meet their tragic destiny.
For a director originally formed in narrative rather than encontrársele cinéphiles common roots, seem to recognize, both in the construction of the characters, as in Arkansas that sleep between cotton fields, a pervasive legacy of American literature. Essentially, the characters have a distinct wedge carveriana, embodying a frugal individuals, hopeless, melancholy, entirely besieged by a kind of fatalistic dignity. At the other end, violence remains waiting under the boards, always about to be unleashed, that brings us to the deep South as portrayed in the apocalyptic novels of Cormac McCarthy. Parsimony and violence, serenity and explosion are the two sides of the scale on which the film keeps a deft balance.
Hayes The three brothers, Son, Kid and Boy (in English, "Son," "Child" and "Boy") in their very names embody the displeasure of an alcoholic father, who did not bother to award them a name, leaving them early, then becoming a good, clean Christian and other family form. The lives of the three brothers are not particularly exciting, or rather the opposite: Son (Michael Shannon) is completely convinced he had discovered a system to beat the casino, but such activity, so far unsuccessful-earned him abandoning his wife and son, Kid (Barlow Jacobs) wants to marry his girlfriend, but has no money, living with a minimum of a tent in the back of the house of Son, Boy (Douglas Ligon) sleep and practically live in a defective pickup basketball and teaches a group of Children who fail to complete the five players to a team. Read, it's hard not to think about these characters from the typical size of losers , bordering at times with comedy. In fact, the daily record of the lives of the characters often incurs a content mood, slightly absurd, which can be traced back to Slacker, Richard Linklater, especially the inclusion of some characters like Shampoo unpresentable-or even Napoleon Dynamite -comedy that could not be more at odds with this family drama, but has in its rural environment and the ridiculous use of silence, a common air.
All would appear that the lives of three brothers running a flat and orderly way, until one night, the mother-to which none seems to profess much love, "his father advised that just died, "Your father died," "Where you going to bury?", "Read it in the newspapers," Are you going? "," No ".
Death, far from allowing them to make peace with its former parent, leading to the three bastards breaking into the funeral organized by the other family-in appearance, much less dysfunctional, ending with are spitting on the coffin of veiled. That same act opens the box (or in this case, the drawer) Pandora facing the children of two families, starting a race that will take several lifetimes.
Family Killings tend be typical of period pieces (usually inspired by the Middle Ages or Renaissance) or gangster stories, but the revenge thirsty that between the two sides of half-brothers, happens without any hint of showmanship, rather surrounded by an aura of inevitability and despair. One of the great achievements of Nichols is to create a system of cause and effect where at some point, one wonders how it got to where it is, not to discover later that everything happened in a logical, inevitable, quite plausible.
In this genealogy of violence is in part Greek tragedy, part western, part drama biblical the title "Shotgun Stories", seems to include more than one sense. One would think that these "shotgun stories" would refer to their use by both sides, but, in truth, most of the film, the guns are conspicuous by their absence. Unlike this, the gun referred to seem to refer to the notorious shot scars that are shining in his back, and with which practically opens and closes the film. The "stories" are none other than those who invent their colleagues, trying to predict or explain the origin of these footprints.
Jeff Nichols in a recent interview, he said the character that more time was designing for the film is not Son, nor the rest of the brothers, but his father's. Such a declaration, for a character who does not even appear, talk about this film on a structured absence, the legacy of someone who, while not, is still there and working, as the scar on the back of Son.
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