Underrated: Shotgun Stories

       
          The brothers are named Son, Boy and Kid. These are their legal names. Their father, a drunk who changed his ways grew a conscience, left his three sons and started a new family after his metamorphosis. They grew up fending for themselves in a rural Arkansas town. Son, the oldest (played by the always brilliant Michael Shannon), is a fisherman. He is quiet and filled with fury. Boy, the middle child, coaches middle school basketball and lives in his van. He has no fight left in him after a troubled adolescence. Kid, the youngest, is a mechanic for Kia Motors and looking for a raise. He's loud and belligerent and ready to fight anybody who opposes the brothers.

        We see their lives as simple and desperate. The brothers have no money, no direction, no ambition. Son lives in a shotgun shack beside a wild field that used to harvest the family's farm. His house is the only semblance of what used to be a successful, happy family.

       The film, written and directed by Take Shelter's Jeff Nichols, begins with the brothers learning that their father has died, and that the funeral is taking place tomorrow. When the brothers arrive at the funeral, we find out that the other family -- the half brothers -- are affluent and proud. They love their father and everything he stood for. Son can't handle this fact. He is suffocated by the idea that his father may have been a good man. That a good man may have left his three boys behind in order to make a new life, as if his own children were the evidence of a misdeed.

      Son decides he's got something to say at the funeral. He tells the congregation that his father was an evil man. That he left his family all alone to fend for themselves. Son spits on his father's coffin. This starts a war between the families.

          Like he does in Take Shelter, Nichols relies heavily on the silent intensity of Shannon's presence. He is truly amazing, here. Everything he does feels calculated, precise. His anger is revealed only in short bursts, punctuating his otherwise calm temperament.

         The film is a parable. The police don't exist. The town is a vacuum where all that matters is the war between the families. Shotgun Stories is reminiscent of David Gordon Green (who serves as a producer)'s early films, such as George Washington or Snow Angels. The narrative is episodic and focused primarily on the rural life of a community. The characters are intelligent without ambition. Sometimes it's hard not to see them as bums, but the closer we get to them, the more we can sympathize with how simply they live.

         Shotgun Stories is a surprising success. Its deliberate pacing and episodic nature mirror that of an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama. The writing is king, whereas the visuals only seem to serve as vehicles for dialogue. It's an interesting film that is, for some reason, never really talked about. Hopefully the success of Take Shelter will increase the demand for what I find to be one of the most interesting films I've seen in quite some time.

I give Shotgun Stories an 8 out 10 wet coffins.

Movie Review: Take Shelter

   
          Michael Shannon's eyes have been put to great use in the last decade. You might know him from Revolutionary Road, where he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of John Givings, the math professor who has had a psychotic break. Sometimes actors are just born to play a certain type. Tim Blake Nelson has made an excellent career of playing rural idiots, Michael Douglas has made his fortune playing high-class snobs. The list goes on.

         Of course, there are certain pitfalls to this kind of typecasting. For every George Clooney, where variations on a theme can lead to exciting and surprising results, there is always a Michael Ironside, where the performer is forced to play one note parts until they retire.

        For a while there it was looking like Michael Shannon was going to be stuck in the latter category, forever playing the crazy uncle or the unhinged friend. However, in the last few years, Shannon has done a remarkable job of taking challenging roles that compliment his interesting face and physicality. Take his performance in the underrated masterpiece BUG, where his intense eyes almost make us believe in the insects we can't see. Or his performance in 2009's brilliant My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, where Shannon's performance teeters somewhere between Marlon Brando and Bela Lugosi (no small feat), while simultaneously allowing us to project our own fears and desires onto him.

       It seems that directors have taken note of Shannon's ability to convey emotion without speaking. Perhaps more than any other actor working today, Michael Shannon is the one most suited for silent pictures. His performances are always both understated and bombastic, playing with the balance of the two the way a good musician juggles improvisation and precision.

       And in Jeff Nichols' atmospheric, devastating Take Shelter, Michael Shannon has given us the performance of his career.

      Not since There Will Be Blood have I seen a performance that truly frightened me in this way. Shannon is so believable, so truly unhinged, that I often found myself shaking my head in disbelief. Every movement of his eyes and every twitch of his face has true power. He has mastered the physicality of his performance in such a unique and brilliant way that I could not take my eyes off the screen. He is electric here. Terrifying. I believe every second of his performance, and I can't wait to see what he does with the General Zod in Zack Snyder's upcoming Man of Steel.

      As for the film itself, I'll give you a little background. If you haven't seen the chilling trailer yet, here's a quick summary of the plot. Curtis has been having nightmares for the last few weeks. Each one contains a storm. Whenever the storm comes, something happens to his daughter. The dreams become more vivid and violent as the film goes on, and his visions of the apocalypse begin to invade his waking life. Before long, it becomes unclear as to whether Curtis is truly having visions or just succumbing to mental illness.

   
       Jeff Nichols' script and direction are incredibly ambitious for the obviously low budget on this film, and his script does a very good job of slowly building the suspense and the macabre atmosphere of the whole thing. The cinematography is still, deliberate, and the shot composition always leaves the main focus of the frame just a little bit obscured. As the film is told through the perspective of Curtis, Nichols uses the cinematography to limit the audience. We aren't allowed to know what Curtis does not, and Nichols wisely leaves it up to us to decide if Curtis is a prophet or just insane.

      The other standout performance in this film is by The Tree of Life and The Help's Jessica Chastain, who seems to have come out of nowhere this year and surprised everyone with three excellent performances in a row. As Curtis' wife, Samantha, Chastain must perform the hardest job in the film--that is, play opposite such a juicy, provocative role and still maintain the audience's attention. And not only does she hold her own next to Shannon's powerhouse performance, but she sometimes exceeds even his abilities and reaches amazing heights. Nichols better be glad he got Chastain when he did, because she is bound for great things in the coming years--and even greater paychecks.

     Of course, Take Shelter isn't perfect. It is a little overwritten, running perhaps fifteen minutes too long, and sometimes the plot beats are a little predictable, but when this film is in its stride, there is really nothing like it. It is haunting, emotional, honest, and, most of all, ambitious.

    See it for Shannon's performance. It is one of the great performances of our time.


I give Take Shelter 8/10 Spooky Dream Sequences

Films that didn't beat the odds but should have: BUG

     Maybe it isn't the seventies anymore, but give William Friedkin some credit. He made The French Connection and The Exorcist and the strangely forgotten To Live and Die in L.A., and for some reason dropped off of the map. Well, not just some reason, there are several good reasons (I'm looking at you The Hunted), but it seems like he went from a well respected, bankable director to a television movie director (literally, he directed a television adaptation of 12 Angry Men). Okay, so his career is questionable, but you can't ever rule out the guy who created two of the most iconic films ever made.
     But it seems like we have.
     I have no other explanation for how the deliciously insane horror film Bug(2006) failed at the box office and with most critics than to say that the public consensus of William Friedkin is that he is no longer "with us". I assure you that he most definitely is. Bug is not just a horror film, it's a drama, a comedy, a character study, and a surprisingly heartbreaking tragedy. Of course, you wouldn't know it from the terrible trailers that marketed the movie, nor could you tell from the ridiculous categorization of this movie as a thriller.
    To put something straight, if a horror movie is looking for acclaim, those who market the movie call it a thriller. The Sixth Sense, clearly a horror film, was marketed as a thriller. I understand that horror as a genre has always had a stigma, like it's low art. Granted, a ton of horror movies are low art. This shouldn't stop us from calling something what it is. The Silence of the Lambs is a horror film, as is The Exorcist, and I think everybody knows that by now. But when a movie like Bug comes along, with a slow moving story that settles into the back of your mind and then slaps it, don't tell people that they are going to be thrilled. They won't be. National Treasure is a thrilling movie. Psycho is a thriller. There are moments that come out of nowhere, as part of a ride, and shock you. Movies like the ones previously mentioned, work slowly to draw you in and scare you. Their entire purpose is to scare you. A thriller is to make you sit on the edge of your seat and occasionally jump out of your seat, but a horror movie, a true horror movie, simply lights a candle in the back of your mind and lets the wax seep into your synapses. Now, isn't that a delightful little image?
     Now that I've gotten that out of the way, it's important to note that Friedkin did not write Bug. The screenplay, as well as the play from which the screenplay was adapted, was written by Tracy Letts. The writing is sensational. The film involves the slow transition of a woman from her lonely need for companionship to a truly terrifying mental instability. It does this realistically and with no sign of pretension.
     Michael Shannon reprises his role from the stage play and hits the right notes, doing crazy as he seems to always do, but the real standout performance here is by Ashley Judd. She is absolutely mesmerizing in her depiction of a woman who is handicapped by the loss of her son and the controlling hand of her recently paroled ex-husband (played by an admittedly hammy Harry Conick Jr.). Judd has control of every scene, and she guides the audience through a transition that is, to put it lightly, difficult to believe. Yet she somehow makes it look completely effortless.
    Perhaps the biggest problem with this movie is what makes it so good. Friedkin, a director who has never left the seventies in terms of his style and content, treats the movie with no sense of ironic detachment or tongue-in-cheek asides for the audience. The story is simply told, and disintegrating minds simply disintegrate. The line "I am the super mother bug!" is delivered without a hint of humor. Audiences these days, especially in my generation, don't take kindly to films that expect you to take them seriously. And this line, I must say, would break the walls of even the most stalwart 16 year olds, the current market and obvious demographic target for recent "thrillers" and horror films.
     But please, if you can even find it these days, look up Bug and take ninety minutes out of your day to watch what happens to be, in my opinion, to be one of the most criminally overlooked and devastating horror films in quite some time.
     (If you're interested, check out another strangely overlooked film, Rob Zombie's Halloween II)