"Ebertfest 2008: Shotgun Stories"
(April 2008)
Online Copy

“Presently the discourse fell upon 'feuds,' for in no part of the South has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer between warring families, than in this particular region.” -Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

As he rode down the Mississippi, Mark Twain came across a man who told him of a feud between the Darnells and the Watsons. They forgot why the families started fighting – “Some says it was about a horse or a cow” – but whenever they met, they would shoot to kill. The Darnells lost, the last three heirs to the family picked off in a steamboat holdup.

This kind of chivalric senselessness, this proud, unending violence, is something I expect of a family feud. Something like the Montagues and the Capulets – so much unreasonable group hatred that it sprouts tangles of fate and tragedy. Of course, there are lighter variations – like Gogol’s The Squabble between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich or the Simpsons against the Flanders, in which insults (“goose”) or contests (miniature golf) replace bloodshed.

Shotgun Stories – the opening Friday film of Ebertfest – wanted to tell of a serious and tragic southern feud, but more often felt like the anecdote Twain heard, making you cringe, shake your head, and forget about it. Director Jeff Nichols set the feud in Arkansas, near his hometown of Little Rock. He said in an introduction that, “It was real important for the film to show this place and these people as I saw it growing up.”

Nichols’ plot grows from the standard soil of independent films: the broken family. Three brothers – Boy, Kid, and Son – learn of their father’s death. He was an alcoholic and left them with a brutal mother, who actually seems quite congenial in her few scenes. Daddy started a new family, quit the drink, and found Jesus. The boys crash the funeral, starting a feud with their half-brothers.

Nichols tries to be laconic in dialogue – his characters speaking in terse monosyllables – and in photography – his camera gazes at the cotton fields and the silos, at Main Street and at the trailer park. Much of it evokes the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men.

However, it was a languorous beginning to a day of four films, evidenced by the man to my left who dozed off, and the one to my right who was checking his PDA. To tell a slow, measured story – as Nichols seemed to want – gives us time to look at the characters, to sense them as real people. This is a problem, though, when the characters either seem improbable or, worse, predictable, such as the brother who looks as out-of-shape as comedian Artie Lang, yet is a basketball coach, or the college student half-brother who, when he can’t fix a tractor, is told he isn’t taught anything at “that school”.

In his discussion after the film, Nichols stressed how he wanted to portray a place and people he knew. He also – inadvertently – revealed why this movie, despite it’s attempt at authenticity, felt hackneyed and forced. He said that, while he knew the town, the plot was foreign: “My family loves me, there the ones that helped me make this movie.”

Nichols may know the vernacular of the south, but it won’t help him write the words of murder and abandonment and revenge. After the film, the audience applauded warmly and the interviewers gave praise. My main thought while watching was: when are they going to get the shotguns?


©2009 Tim Peters/All rights reserved