Ratings
THE DAILY: 3 of 5 Stars
ROTTEN TOMATOES: 35%
Why remake “Straw Dogs”? Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 original, which debuted to shocked audiences and despairing reviews, is still as bloody and disturbing as the day it was made. Modern attitudes about masculinity, sexuality and male-female relationships have only softened; in this gentler light, Peckinpah’s stark moral drama, about a couple pushed to the edge and beyond, feels in 2011 even more harsh and vituperative than it probably did to audiences 40 years ago.
And yet director Rod Lurie has remade the film. Not just remade it — at times, this “Straw Dogs” is truly a re-enactment, with whole scenes and lines of dialogue from the original imported into Lurie’s new script verbatim. In both films, a newly married couple, David and Amy Sumner, played in Peckinpah’s movie by Dustin Hoffman and Susan George and in Lurie’s version by James Marsden and Kate Bosworth, return to Amy’s childhood home, where they come into ever-more-terrifying contact with a gang of locals.
Lurie updates the milieu from rural England to rural Mississippi, and changes David’s profession from wonky, nebbishy mathematician to oblivious, country-clubbing Hollywood screenwriter. Amy’s given a job — in the original, she’s a housewife; in the remake, she’s a television actress — and her hometown is transformed into the now-familiar “Friday Night Lights” landscape of churches, high school football and local bars full of Confederate-flag-flying good ol’ boys.
But the basic plot remains unchanged. The incandescent Amy once again draws the leering eyes of every man in town, including Charlie (here played by Alexander Skarsgard), an improbably muscled and deceptively polite old flame. He’s a roofer by trade, and the Sumners just happen to have a barn that needs fixin’, so in a misguided gesture of goodwill, a Harvard lacrosse T-shirt-sporting David hires Charlie and his roughneck crew to work on the property. It’s an oblivious decision with dire consequences, and the provocations immediately begin to escalate. Amy swans around the property, David loses himself in a screenplay about the battle of Stalingrad, and Charlie’s crew sets to seeing just how many liberties — up to and including theft, torture and rape — they can take with this naïve young couple before they begin to fight back.
One of the reasons Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” was so disturbing was the way it toyed with the audience’s sympathies, baiting viewers into despising the movie’s ostensible hero for his cowardice and failure to protect his wife. As played by Marsden, David is simultaneously effete and condescending, hypocritical and smug. He’s a credit card man in a cash town, driving his vintage Jaguar around ostentatiously but unable to change the tires when they go flat. He reprimands Charlie’s crew for showing up early at the house and waking him up, but says nothing when they stroll uninvited into his home and help themselves to the beer in his kitchen.
Amy, who knows these men better, despises David’s weakness even as she longs for his protection. As she jogs around their land, the men stare, but all David can manage when she complains to him is to applaud their good taste. Then he tells her to consider wearing a bra. “Reaping and sowing and all that,” he says — a statement more apt than he realizes.
What is to come is an orgy of assault and violence. The severity of the final third of the movie is what so perturbed critics and viewers in 1971, and viewers in 1971, but Peckinpah’s real accomplishment was not just to suggest that — if pushed far enough — all of us are capable of unimaginable things. It was also to expose how easily people can be manipulated into untenable moral stances: first Amy, as she’s raped by Charlie in a scene that suggests some awful, lingering hint of consent, and then David, as he rampages through their home, fighting back at last.
The screening audience with whom I saw Lurie’s version applauded David’s violent turn, and this was exactly Peckinpah’s intention. Amy never tells David of Charlie’s assault, and when the two finally engage their aggressors, it’s to protect a local mentally disabled man who has a lynch mob after him. But he may be guilty of precisely what the town thinks he’s guilty of, and David — who was a coward when it mattered — finds his courage only in defense of a possibly indefensible man. Even though we are meant to applaud it as such, his “revenge” isn’t justice, it’s murder, arguably as wrong as anything the film’s ostensible villains are guilty of. As David discovers a bloodlust unmoored from any meaningful justification beyond self-defense, so — to our horror — do we.
Perhaps Lurie’s intention in remaking “Straw Dogs” was no more complicated than to show that in 2011, viewers are just as prone to falling into the same trap. His adaptation is not hacky, or cynical, or any more exploitative than the original. (The film’s one real joke comes when one of the roofers asks Marsden’s character, “You ever do horror films, like ‘Saw’?”) Lurie has less of a feel for ambiguity than the notoriously pessimistic Peckinpah, whose Amy is more flirtatious and harder to pin down than Lurie’s. Bosworth portrays a woman more wholeheartedly devoted to her man and more genuinely affronted by the sleazy attentions of her old classmates; when Charlie comes for her, it’s even less believable that she would want any part of it.
Lurie lets his film end on a decidedly more uncomplicated note of vengeance than Peckinpah’s, which finishes with David owning up to how lost he’s become. It’s a telling scene to leave out, and suggests that Lurie may be just as taken by the retributive violence at the finale of his film as the audiences who will likely cheer it in theaters once again.
THE DAILY: 3 of 5 Stars
ROTTEN TOMATOES: 35%
Why remake “Straw Dogs”? Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 original, which debuted to shocked audiences and despairing reviews, is still as bloody and disturbing as the day it was made. Modern attitudes about masculinity, sexuality and male-female relationships have only softened; in this gentler light, Peckinpah’s stark moral drama, about a couple pushed to the edge and beyond, feels in 2011 even more harsh and vituperative than it probably did to audiences 40 years ago.
And yet director Rod Lurie has remade the film. Not just remade it — at times, this “Straw Dogs” is truly a re-enactment, with whole scenes and lines of dialogue from the original imported into Lurie’s new script verbatim. In both films, a newly married couple, David and Amy Sumner, played in Peckinpah’s movie by Dustin Hoffman and Susan George and in Lurie’s version by James Marsden and Kate Bosworth, return to Amy’s childhood home, where they come into ever-more-terrifying contact with a gang of locals.
Lurie updates the milieu from rural England to rural Mississippi, and changes David’s profession from wonky, nebbishy mathematician to oblivious, country-clubbing Hollywood screenwriter. Amy’s given a job — in the original, she’s a housewife; in the remake, she’s a television actress — and her hometown is transformed into the now-familiar “Friday Night Lights” landscape of churches, high school football and local bars full of Confederate-flag-flying good ol’ boys.
But the basic plot remains unchanged. The incandescent Amy once again draws the leering eyes of every man in town, including Charlie (here played by Alexander Skarsgard), an improbably muscled and deceptively polite old flame. He’s a roofer by trade, and the Sumners just happen to have a barn that needs fixin’, so in a misguided gesture of goodwill, a Harvard lacrosse T-shirt-sporting David hires Charlie and his roughneck crew to work on the property. It’s an oblivious decision with dire consequences, and the provocations immediately begin to escalate. Amy swans around the property, David loses himself in a screenplay about the battle of Stalingrad, and Charlie’s crew sets to seeing just how many liberties — up to and including theft, torture and rape — they can take with this naïve young couple before they begin to fight back.
One of the reasons Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” was so disturbing was the way it toyed with the audience’s sympathies, baiting viewers into despising the movie’s ostensible hero for his cowardice and failure to protect his wife. As played by Marsden, David is simultaneously effete and condescending, hypocritical and smug. He’s a credit card man in a cash town, driving his vintage Jaguar around ostentatiously but unable to change the tires when they go flat. He reprimands Charlie’s crew for showing up early at the house and waking him up, but says nothing when they stroll uninvited into his home and help themselves to the beer in his kitchen.
Amy, who knows these men better, despises David’s weakness even as she longs for his protection. As she jogs around their land, the men stare, but all David can manage when she complains to him is to applaud their good taste. Then he tells her to consider wearing a bra. “Reaping and sowing and all that,” he says — a statement more apt than he realizes.
What is to come is an orgy of assault and violence. The severity of the final third of the movie is what so perturbed critics and viewers in 1971, and viewers in 1971, but Peckinpah’s real accomplishment was not just to suggest that — if pushed far enough — all of us are capable of unimaginable things. It was also to expose how easily people can be manipulated into untenable moral stances: first Amy, as she’s raped by Charlie in a scene that suggests some awful, lingering hint of consent, and then David, as he rampages through their home, fighting back at last.
The screening audience with whom I saw Lurie’s version applauded David’s violent turn, and this was exactly Peckinpah’s intention. Amy never tells David of Charlie’s assault, and when the two finally engage their aggressors, it’s to protect a local mentally disabled man who has a lynch mob after him. But he may be guilty of precisely what the town thinks he’s guilty of, and David — who was a coward when it mattered — finds his courage only in defense of a possibly indefensible man. Even though we are meant to applaud it as such, his “revenge” isn’t justice, it’s murder, arguably as wrong as anything the film’s ostensible villains are guilty of. As David discovers a bloodlust unmoored from any meaningful justification beyond self-defense, so — to our horror — do we.
Perhaps Lurie’s intention in remaking “Straw Dogs” was no more complicated than to show that in 2011, viewers are just as prone to falling into the same trap. His adaptation is not hacky, or cynical, or any more exploitative than the original. (The film’s one real joke comes when one of the roofers asks Marsden’s character, “You ever do horror films, like ‘Saw’?”) Lurie has less of a feel for ambiguity than the notoriously pessimistic Peckinpah, whose Amy is more flirtatious and harder to pin down than Lurie’s. Bosworth portrays a woman more wholeheartedly devoted to her man and more genuinely affronted by the sleazy attentions of her old classmates; when Charlie comes for her, it’s even less believable that she would want any part of it.
Lurie lets his film end on a decidedly more uncomplicated note of vengeance than Peckinpah’s, which finishes with David owning up to how lost he’s become. It’s a telling scene to leave out, and suggests that Lurie may be just as taken by the retributive violence at the finale of his film as the audiences who will likely cheer it in theaters once again.
