Straw Dogs Directed by Rod Lur ie Star r ing James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgård Released November 4
ontroversial, nasty and fascinating, Sam Peckinpah’s landmark 1971 rape ’n’ revenge thriller was all the things this intriguing Hollywood remake isn’t. But writer/director Rod Lurie's modern update is still something of a surprise. Forty years ago, Dustin Hoffman was the dorky American mathematician who takes his young English wife, Susan, back to her native Cornwall farmhouse, where their civilised lives are torn apart by her ex-boyfriend and his inbred cronies. Way more artfully crafted than you’d expect, Lurie’s remake carefully follows the path of the original while adding a few ideas of its own. Switching Cornwall for the Deep South, Mississippi, it’s also propped up by a strong cast upping their game dramatically. James Marsden plays David, an intellectual LA screenwriter. Kate Bosworth is Amy, his TV-actress wife. And Alexander Skarsgård is good ’ol boy Charlie, the town’s ex-jock and Amy’s former high-school beau. Humid, lush and oppressive, Lurie evocatively captures the look and feel of small-town America and makes gratifyingly measured work of bringing tensions to the boil. David immediately rubs the natives the wrong way by arriving in a Jaguar and
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trying to buy a light beer with a credit card. At home, he listens to Beethoven, works on a screenplay about Stalingrad (subtle!), keeps fit by skipping rope and does nothing to stop Charlie and his boys leering at his neglected wife as she jogs around in microscopic shorts and no bra. But Lurie, a former-film critic-turnedfilmmaker, can’t find a convincing final doorway into the film’s climactic orgy of violence. Amy’s double-rape – famously argued over by critics, censors and feminists – remains extremely uncomfortable, but it loses the terrible ambiguity of Peckinpah’s version. More crucially, David’s psychological arc – finally manning-up by sinking down into primal frenzy – just doesn’t shift convincingly. One minute he’s listening to Beethoven. Next minute he’s grabbing a nail gun, a bear trap, two pots of boiling oil and smashing a man’s head to a pulp to defend his home. This tilt into macho bloodlust – by him and us – is the whole point of the film: unmasking the savage animal that still crouches in the most civilised modern man. Visceral and gripping as it often is, however, Lurie’s version fails to show how David ‘wins’ but loses everything he stands for in the process, leaving you wondering just what the whole film actually has to say for itself.
Then again, the fact that nothing in Straw Dogs quite shocks like it needs to perhaps says more about our ceiling for screen carnage than it does about Lurie’s film. Even if it’s less provocative than the original, the daring of the cast and the edginess of the themes make this much more interesting than most studio films. The charismatic Skarsgård, in particular, has a character with new, deeper shades. There was a danger that a Hollywood remake of Straw Dogs could’ve been a simple, tasteless, exploitative exercise (see last year’s I Spit on Your Grave). At the very least, Lurie’s effort emerges as something much more serious than it might have been. Jonathan Crocker
Anticipation.
Controversial ’70s landmark reduxed by Hollywood. Hmm.
Enjoyment.
Uneven but intriguing and much, much better than expected.
In Retrospect. M a r s d e n , Boswor th and Skarsgård are s u p e r b. B u t w h at wa s t h e p o i n t ?