Film - Think

Other than the fact that Shotgun Stories is what Bottle Rocket would have looked like if directed by David Gordon Greene, it is appealing in the quiet way it ignores pretty much every storytelling device you would expect from a revenge film. The tale of two sets of half-brothers, one abandoned by their father and left to a life of rural poverty while he tended to the other, Shotgun Stories unfolds in vignettes of country living until the balance of these two families is upset at the father's funeral. Rolling along through effortless landscape shots and documentarian observations of tractor maintenance and fish-farms, the film only seems aware of its storyline every once and awhile. But this is okay, as the soundtrack and scenery serve to balance out the tension that explodes in violent conflict at several points, calmly dragging the viewer the length of the film's obsession with these families' aggression and loss. I enjoy southern gothic literature because it is seldom tidy or conclusive, often offering little more than impressions of a theme or an idea that haunts each character's presence. O'Connor, for example, doesn't always seem aware of what she is thinking or saying, in stories like Parker's Back building tension until it breaks and peters out in haunting descriptions. Likewise, Shotgun Stories seems less interested in resolution than it does in exploring the mood of revenge. It certainly comes to a surprising conclusion, but this is more an afterthought to the damage already done, the film moving in ripples from this center. I appreciated the naturalism here, as it is not nearly as pretentious as it sounds. It helps to think of it as a prequel to The Straight Story.