Gunfighter Paradise

> **"\[...\] fathers often deploy their sons as religious mercenaries. And this is how the father barters his way into heaven -- by teaching the son how to harvest a soul."** Writer and director Jethro Waters' **GUNFIGHTER PARADISE** functions as scathing visual essay on America's shambolic obsession with religion and guns -- with fathers and sons superstitiously stumbling through their God-abandoned universe. Or North Carolina. The film begins with a characteristically acerbic and telling quote from Mark Twain: ***“Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.”*** Waters' film draws heavily from Freudian tropes and Arthurian legend -- but I'll wager it also achieves something extraordinarily literary -- that of an epic poem. The return of our protagonist, aptly named Stoner (Braz Cubas), following his mother’s death, signals in medias res — a convention that discards a traditional beginning in favor of a life-altering event that reverberates throughout the film. (Jessica Hecht's comforting voiceovers as The Mother provide a sharp contrast to Cubas’ increasingly unhinged musings). If we were looking for an Invocation of the Muse(s), look no further than the resplendent, reverential description of how to correctly use, maintain, and fire a handgun midway through the film, with Stoner as the father and the viewer as the submissive child. Stoner’s journey through his evolving spiritual beliefs is accompanied by an old acquaintance, Joel (Joel Lofting). Both men pack heat against the homegrown dangers that have become endemic to American life — dangers rooted in the long shadow of the Civil War, where gun culture, patriotism, and Christianity blur into gundamentalist hysteria. The satire is opaque, but welcome in this dark, worrying glimpse of where America -- specifically the Bible-thumping South -- is unfortunately headed. As conventional epic poems go, no, this is not a traditional episodic cinematic journey -- that's for Christopher Nolan's magnum opus (**THE ODYSSEY**) later this year. Rather, **GUNFIGHTER PARADISE** is a deeply cerebral and unnervingly quiet, psychological journey into paranoia, and the darker recesses of the American psyche.