Why on earth would anyone want to remake Straw Dogs? Sam Peckinpah’s original film, released in 1971, is a provocative, disconcerting examination of man’s basest impulses. Its violence, a source of some controversy when it was released, seems relatively tame by today’s standards; its core assertion – that we’re all capable of the most extreme barbarism if pushed far enough – still unnerves. But it was very much a product of its time, borne out of the social unrest and political upheaval of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The appeal – commercial and otherwise – of a modernized re-telling would seem perilously limited.
In the new version, director Rod Lurie (Resurrecting the Champ, The Contender) partly refashions Straw Dogs as a ham-fisted allegory for the increasingly acrimonious red state/blue state divide. It is exceedingly clear which side he’s on. James Marsden plays David Sumner, a Hollywood screenwriter who moves with his actress wife, Amy (Kate Bosworth), to her hometown of Blackwater, Mississippi, after her father’s death. Their stay is intended as only temporary, long enough for them to prepare the family home for sale and for David to finish his latest screenplay, about the siege of Stalingrad.
Blackwater presents more or less the prototypical (i.e., clichéd) Hollywood vision of a rural Deep South town, populated with scruffy, churlish yokels who instinctively recoil at anything resembling sophistication. Gun racks and confederate flags and “These Colors Don’t Run” bumper stickers abound. David, with his vintage Jaguar, credit cards, and polysyllabic vocabulary, incurs immediate resentment. David’s thinly-veiled condescension doesn’t help matters.
Everywhere he goes, David is eyed with suspicion and made to feel unwelcome. Hoping to ingratiate himself with the townsfolk, he hires a local construction crew, headed by Amy’s handsome ex-boyfriend, Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), to repair a barn damaged during a recent storm. The men prove less-than-stellar workers, drinking on the job, leaving early to go hunting, and brazenly treading about the house as if they own it. Equivocal by nature, David is loath to confront them, and Charlie and the boys seize on his timidity. Their provocations soon adopt a more sinister face.
Straw Dogs, like its predecessor, is built around a climactic final “siege” of the Sumner house, when David, surrounded on all sides by men intent on taking everything he has, is finally driven to fight back. But whereas Pekinpah’s film filled the preceding minutes with scene after scene of troubling moral complexity, Lurie’s version can only offer unremitting tedium. His Straw Dogs is, more than anything else, a terminal bore. At 110 minutes, it is actually shorter than the original, but it feels a good deal longer. Even a pivotal rape scene – in which the victim’s consent is ever-so-briefly implied – and some virtuoso scenery-chewing from James Woods, playing an alcoholic ex-football coach, can’t breathe much life into this empty, mundane film.
By Thomas Leupp
Release Date: 09/16/2011
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hr 49 mins
Genre: Thriller
Director: Rod Lurie
Cast: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgård, James Woods
