Hoo-Boy, sorry about the break. I was on a sort of summer vacation and I didn’t meant to neglect you all. Here’s a new movie!

I became interested in Jeff Nichol’s Shotgun Stories when I came across an article that mentioned that the film and its style were similar in many ways to the work of David Gordon Green, one of my favorite American directors. Green’s films, which include the Criterion-rewarded George Washington and art-house favorite All The Real Girls, have often been placed in the “Southern Gothic” sub-genre of films and, living most of my adult life in a city, these stories of small towns and simple people hold a certain kind of poetry for me. What I didn’t know was that Green was more than just a creative influence on Nichols, he was a producer on the film. When his name came up as the credits rolled, I let out a thunderous “Ooohhhhhh” and it’s because his influence is heavily felt. Shotgun Stories is a haunting film that effectively explores deep feelings of neglect and revenge.

The story concerns two groups of brothers, both offspring of the same man, in a small town in Arkansas. The patriarch of both families sired first Son, Kid and Boy, so-named because the father was a violent alcoholic who left the boys nameless and alone with their mother, out of selfishness and uncaring. Some time later he renounced all his sins, became a devout Christian, and sired four more boys with a new mother. But he never made things right by his first family. The boys’ mother blaming them for their father’s departure, were taught to hate him and his new family with a vengeance.

This unspoken hatred between new and old families comes to a boil at the funeral for the father, and as a feud escalates, it becomes more and more likely that the memory of this man will be the end of both families.

Normally I would talk first about the film’s successes, before discussing what its failures are, but I found that Shotgun Stories’ quirks are its biggest successes. There is very little exposition in the dialogue, which brings out a realness in the characters that is striking, but the film has a way of bleeding out information about characters little by little, and I found myself struggling to understand these people and their intentions. For example, we get to the conflict of the film, the feud, well before we understand the men’s lives and backstories.

The gradual revealing of characters’ intentions makes them fall victim to a woodenness for the first half of the film, almost as actors in a play. Overwhelmed by the meager background and subtle detail, there are points when we are treated to a few little “slice of life” moments that ring so true and real that I found a smile spreading over my face. But the film’s characters regard these moments as they do everything else in the film: with expressions devoid of emotion. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe this man who died, maybe this whole town, have made Son, Boy and Kid apathetic about everything. The payoff ended up working for me, but its a style that I could see being a turn-off for those with less patience for languid pacing.

Aside from a very nice score and wonderful cinematography of the South, I wanted to make a special mention of Michael Shannon, who I last saw in a fascinating portrait of mental un-health in Bug. In Shotgun Stories he gives a performance as the mumbling, but stoic Son, the oldest of the feuding Hayes brothers. I’m not sure of his range in the long run, (his character in Bug was quite similar,) but it’s a character that manages to just sweat sadness from every pore.

Whether or not you share my feelings on the film’s rewards, it is no doubt a shame that the studios have overlooked the film for so long; the principal photography for Shotgun Stories was done in 2004, and the film was in some sort of studio limbo until late last year. Nichols says in his artist’s statement that his intention was to show that “there is no victory in revenge,” and to counteract the effects of a society that lionizes such acts. While I’m not convinced it’s as unfamiliar territory as Nichols thinks, the real-life tragedy of revenge is painted compellingly in his debut feature.