It is no mystery that the statistics related to
death by handguns in the United States is a call for alarm. Following the
massacre at Columbine High School, Michael Moore’s Bowling
for Columbine tackled the issue using facts, conjecture, and plenty
of tragedy. Gus Van Sant’s documentary-style Elephant
similarly addressed the subject of school shootings, aiming for a more direct
approach by focusing his fictitious film directly on the assailants and
victims. Combining these two movies would produce something along the lines
of American Gun, the directorial debut of Aric Avelino.
Three separate stories form the basis of the film, all involving today’s
gun culture. In one, a young girl (Linda Cardellini) deals with self-defense
issues while selling guns in a store run by her grandfather (Donald Sutherland).
Another tangent focuses on a school administrator (Forest Whitaker) managing
the daily drama of keeping his campus safe and unarmed while one of his
better students feels forced to pack heat because of his hostile, late-night
job. The third yarn involves a mother (Marcia Gay Harden) and brother of
a boy who went on a killing spree at his high school and now must cope with
their personal anguish and the neighborhood’s trauma as the anniversary
of the event approaches.
American Gun DVD Review
As three separate films, each of these stories would probably have worked
better than having them pieced together in a way that does little more than
beat over the audience’s head that guns affect people in harmful ways.
The failure of American Gun is no rarity, as it is uncommon
to find a film that doesn’t tie its stories together and still succeed
on all levels in a manner similar to how Robert Altman can so expertly do
in films like Nashville and Short Cuts.
With American Gun, Avelino uses the message as his way
to loosely bind everything, but the result is a patchwork quilt that still
needs to be sewn together.
Given the excellent cast Avelino had to work with, the subject matter, and
the method with which the narrative is structured, one would falsely hope
that there would be a director’s commentary. Instead, the DVD leaves
us like a prude prom date where we finish the night wanting more than what
we got. With a limited theatrical release, the logical business decision
would be to load the DVD with more than just a standard featurette where
the players involved merely further emphasize the purpose of the movie.
American Gun has its heart in
the right place, that being nowhere near Charlton Heston’s cold, dead
hands. However, Bowling for Columbine has more emotion
than all of American Gun in a five-second scene where Moore
consoles a school administrator where a shooting took place. On a similar
note, Elephant applies none of the forced melodrama seen in parts of American
Gun that is compounded by the Traffic-esque color tones used to
separate the stories that further take the film away from the reality it
desires. For all of the movie’s high-minded intentions, don’t
bother hurrying to catch this one right away on DVD, it’ll be getting
heavy rotation on the Lifetime channel soon enough.
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