The dramatis personae of "Shattered" resembles that of a Tennessee Williams play. Set in the Deep South, action revolves around Forrest Burnett, a good old boy and patriarch who becomes a city councilman and rises to the position of mayor. He has the local judges in his hip pocket, and he is able throw his weight and money around to control everyone in his orbit.
Forrest is especially controlling of his long-suffering wife Maureen and his cowed son Kenneth, who is gay. To keep up appearances of what Forrest deems as propriety for the image of his son, Forrest helps to arrange a phony marriage for for Ken with the fiesty Kate Stenson. A weakness of the screenplay was that we never see the courting of Kate and Ken. It is simply announced that the marriage had occurred. With the strong backbone of the Kate, it was not persuasive that she would ever have agreed to a marriage of convenience with Ken, let alone fallen in love with him.
The most painful scenes in the film are those with little Logan, the adopted son of Kate and Ken. The little boy was suffering from "schizoaffective disorder." As portrayed in the film, the problems of the troubled boy may have been due to the drug addition of his unbalanced mother, Emily Searcy.
After Logan tragically dies when struck by a moving vehicle, the second half of the film is given over to the efforts of Kate to extricate herself and her daughter Emma from an intolerable marriage and the clutches of the tyrannical Forrest, who was in fact the father of little Logan. When this sordid background is revealed to the disgusted Kate, she confronts Ken by asserting that he should be ashamed of himself for "playing father to his brother."
The filmmakers reasonably kept in check the highly melodramatic nature of the dysfunctional Burnett clan. There was even an ounce of compassion squeezed out of the paterfamilias Forrest when he finally acknowledged publicly that he supported the sexual orientation of his son. In fact, however, this admission was only a small dose of phony Southern Comfort doled out by unscrupulous Forrest for political purposes: it enabled him to be reelected another term as mayor.