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Reviews By Request: Shotgun Stories (2007, Jeff Nichols)

Paul Clark — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Now that I’ve caught up with just about all of the major 2008 releases I’ve really wanted to, we’ll be going back to the old alternating-weeks format of Reviews By Request and Yesterday’s Hits starting next week. So, as before, I’ll be polling you folks to determine the first of two Oscar-themed Reviews By Request columns, which will run in two weeks. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

One of the better surprises among last week’s Oscar nominations was Michael Shannon’s nomination for best supporting actor in Revolutionary Road. Shannon has been acting in movies for well over a decade, but he first made an impression on me in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, in which his frayed-nerve intensity provided that ponderous film its only sign of life. Since then, Shannon has given vivid performances in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and William Friedkin’s Bug, which along with Revolutionary Road have turned him into Hollywood’s go-to character actor for playing hyper-focused crazies. Shannon’s character in Jeff Nichols’ revenge drama Shotgun Stories might seem on paper to be another unhinged role, but in his capable hands it instead becomes his deepest and most complex performance.

Shannon plays Son, the eldest of three brothers living in a small southern town. Shannon’s character’s name is not a nickname, but rather the legacy of a drunken, uncaring father (his brothers are named Kid and Boy). That he wasn’t named Sue is no doubt of small consolation to Son, whose father left them “in the care of a hateful woman” only to sober up, find Jesus, start a second family and become an all-around productive member of the community. It’s at his father’s funeral that the story is set in motion, when Son and his brothers show up and speak out against the man who abandoned them. Son’s act of spitting on his father’s casket causes the long-simmering resentments between the father’s two families to escalate into an all-out feud.

Normally, the revenge movie isn’t one of my favorite genres, because most movies of the type either emphasize violent action in a way that makes me feel vaguely unclean, or engage in so much hand-wringing that the ethics overwhelm the storytelling. With Shotgun Stories, Nichols avoids falling into either trap. This isn’t a pumped-up thrill ride, but neither is it a pious anti-revenge screed. Instead, it’s a sad, low-key story of two families whose mutual hatred for each other overwhelms their better judgments. Making the story especially tragic is that those who fueled the hatred (the deceased father and the two mothers) don’t bloody their hands from the violence- it’s their sons who suffer from their parents’ misdeeds. As Son tells his mother, “you’ve taught us to hate those boys, and we do. And now it’s come to this.”

Key to the movie’s effect is its setting, an “empty-ass town” with few opportunities available to its residents. In its feel for small-town life, Shotgun Stories owes a debt to filmmakers like David Gordon Green, who executive-produced. Son and Kid work together in a fish hatchery, Boy coaches a youth basketball team, and Son’s hopes of bettering himself hinge on his perfecting a technique to scam the local casino. Son’s wife Annie has moved out of the house with their son, but it’s clear that she still loves Son despite all the disappointment she feels for him. There are moments of happiness to be found in these people’s lives, but this happiness is either fleeting (as when Boy rigs up a blender to his car battery so he can fix margaritas while watching the sun set) or bittersweet due to the difficulties they face. It’s telling that Kid is reluctant to propose marriage to his longtime girlfriend not because he doesn’t love her, but because he’ll have a hard time affording a ring and a place of their own.

In short, these aren’t the stone-cold killers who usually inhabit movies of this sort, so when the violence begins, it doesn’t play out quite the way we expect. At one point, a character purchases a shotgun to use against an enemy, only to realize that he needs lessons in how to assemble and use it. And rather than emphasizing the violence, Nichols focuses on its horrible aftermath, the irreparable damage it causes. For example, Nichols cuts away from a brutal fight that kills one brother on each side, lingering instead on a scene in which both families gather in the hospital, staring each other down from opposite ends of a long hallway.

And in the middle of it, there’s Shannon’s performance, almost certainly the best he’s given to date. It’s been said that intelligence is the ability to hold opposing viewpoints simultaneously, and much of Shannon’s talent is his ability to convey seemingly contradictory impulses in his character. On the one hand, he wants to protect his family and uphold its honor; on the other, he wants to prove to his wife that he can care for her. In theory, these two impulses aren’t so different (they’re simply different facets of his need to do the right thing), but in practice it’s much more complicated. It’s a burden that weighs heavily on Son, and what makes Shannon’s performance such a marvel is that he’s able to convey this burden with a minimum of dialogue or affect, and without resorting to actorly histrionics. With his other notable performances and now Shotgun Stories, Michael Shannon is quickly becoming one of my favorite character actors, and the news that he’s playing the lead role in an upcoming Werner Herzog film is very, very good news indeed.

As you’re all aware, the Oscar ceremony will be airing later this month, and in anticipation of the Academy Awards, I’ll be running special Oscar-themed features over the next four weeks. For my next Reviews By Request column, I’m asking you to choose from five Oscar-nominated favorites, none of which I’ve seen all the way through. So, which will it be?

Which should I write about next? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

In Other Blogs: 2008 Halftime Reports

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Your favorite Screengrab writers have chimed in with their favorites (or least favorites, as the case may be) from the first half of 2008, but it may not completely shock you to learn that we are not the only bloggers to do so. Over at Cinematical, Jeffrey M. Anderson explains why. “Here's one of my dirty little secrets: I love lists and I keep track of my year's ten best movies all year long. Most other critics hastily assemble their lists at the last second, which is partly why so many December movies dominate; critics can't remember what they've seen earlier in the year. My list shows that 2008 has had a pretty poor first half, but I do have some contenders for listhood. Two movies are currently competing for the top spot, though I need to see them both again to be sure. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (6 screens) is one; it has a lovely, laid-back, observant quality and feels less severe than some of Hou's other recent films. But I haven't yet decided if the film is a comedy or a tragedy.”

Also at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg presents a month-by-month breakdown of his year at the movies. As always, January is the cruelest month. “Not many choices, really, but I'm an enthusiastic supporter of both Cloverfield and Teeth. I also enjoyed Cassandra's Dream a bit more than most folks seem to, but it's hardly among Woody Allen's best movies. Beyond that, January was as lame as ever. (Thanks for nothing: One Missed Call, First Sunday, Mad Money, Rambo, Untraceable, and the execrable Meet the Spartans.)”

A site that’s new to us, Gone Elsewhere, weighs in with an overlooked choice. “The best new release I’ve seen thus far is Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories. The film stars Michael Shannon as the oldest of three adult brothers whose father abandoned them years ago and began a new family, with four sons. The two sets of half-brothers grew up as bitter rivals, and emotions come to a head after the father dies. Shannon may be the most creepily intense actor in movies today; see William Friedkin’s Bug if you don’t believe me. Among the more interesting insights the film has to offer is that most of the characters seem to know full well that their actions are irrational and unproductive, but their hatred is self-sustaining and out of their control.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson writes about the ever-changing crimson shades of cinematic blood. “Before the late '70s, blood was generally (and, remember, these are generalizations -- there are certainly exceptions) bright red and opaque, like nail polish or latex paint. It was often compared to ketchup, which in many cases it was. Since then, our taste for blood runs darker, anywhere from ruby red to almost black…My favorite movie-blood story belongs to Martin Scorsese. The way he tells it, the MPAA freaked when they saw the bloodbath in Taxi Driver (1976) and was ready to slap it with an X rating for violence. They suggested he tone it down -- as in, tone down the red -- in order to get an R. So, Scorsese put the scene through some kind of chem wash or something that made the blood more brownish. In his view, it made the scene more sickening and disturbing, but he got his R rating.”

And finally, our List-o-Mania selection this week comes from Spoutblog, which brings us 5 Actors Who Shouldn’t Be Famous. I’m not entirely certain Josh Hartnett even qualifies as famous, but the most controversial choice is Jon Voight. Granted, the included clip of Karate Dog is a powerful indictment.

Related:
2008: Second Quarter Wrap-Up
Half Measures: Leonard Pierce's Favorites of the First Half of '08
Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.