In an online exclusive feature, CityArts critics examine Hollywood’s remake obsession and its negative effects on film culture. Armond White reviews Straw Dogs’ art legacy and takes on the review of record. Gregory Solman recalls what makes Peckinpah great that Rod Lurie just doesn’t understand. And John Demetry analyzes the treacheries of Hollywood hackwork.
Art into Bad Agit-Prop Fools Nobody
The deserved box-office disaster of Sony’s Straw Dogs remake—the South, as well as everywhere else, rising up against this species of estranged Hollywood elitism—merits a variation on Variety’s most famous headline: “Stix Nix Prix Pic.”
Filmmaker Rod Lurie’s benighted religious bigotry is matched only by flyover-country condescension and his seeming self-absorption: He swaps the sober middle class astrophysicist running away from Vietnam War campus tumult into what he thinks will be an English country idyll, into an insufferable sponsored character, a wealthy pseudo-intellectual screenwriter who moves to a place he neither likes nor respects to teach everyone there a lesson in atheistic, moralistic superiority.
Rod Lurie remakes Straw Dogs with the cheap theatrics of a horror film.
Lurie bowdlerizes Sam Peckinpah’s unnerving, sophisticated 1971 psychodrama, which was itself freely adapted from source material by a British novelist, by applying the cheap theatrics of horror movies, so it finally has no resonance or plausibility. In contradistinction, Peckinpah’s work incisively contextualizes the American professor’s ’60s mid-revolution manhood-in-turmoil with Cornwall’s stubbornly retrogressive working class, which includes David’s (Dustin Hoffman) English wife Amy (Susan George). Exuding class distinction, she parades through her hometown brazenly braless, seeming to import ugly-American urban manners and embodying the threat of modern womanhood to economically emasculated men.
Peckinpah’s David dodges what the Englishmen see as “bombin’, riotin’, snipin’, shootin’ the blacks” for an escape into the peaceful, quiet cosmos of his mind. Lurie’s David and his possibly used-up television star wife moves from California to Mississippi for no discernible reason other than show-biz-kid showing off, only to sniff at cash-only bars and spotty cell-phone service and blackboard his siege-of-Stalingrad movie as if he’s the serious historian, not the Hollywood over-simplifier. One man discovers that he can’t go home again; the other learns he should have stayed home.
Lurie invents a modern all-white Mississippi—in reality over a third black—to suggest a segregationist backwater called Blackwater and lend the outsiders broadminded distinction. Using only black and white characterization licenses Lurie to show white devils toting Bibles while they rape and pillage and bully and molest feeble minded (and conveniently unsupervised) adults. It has been thoughtlessly contemporized, though talk of the Iraq war and post-Katrina FEMA money suggests remnants of an obliquely anti-Bush screenplay sitting in Lurie’s drawer since 2005.
Casting the atypically reasonable sheriff (Laz Alonzo) as practically the only black face in the movie betrays Lurie’s craven dishonesty. That racial cipher constructs Hollywood hegemony, too. The local preacher derides the town’s lone veteran’s war as about stemming “the wrath of non-believers,” and in the end even David doesn’t trust him. The sheriff’s vicious murder by the gang (whereas Peckinpah’s local magistrate was accidentally killed in a shotgun struggle) aligns the movie with leftist ideology by reducing him to exploited cannon fodder symbol—while the able-bodied white men stay home to shirk work for deer hunting and drunken debauchery, apparently unable to find high-paying re-write jobs.
In the original, Amy deliberately flashes the workers as a come-on; in Lurie-world, Amy practices a peculiar objectification on demand, teasing the men, then shutting out their view, but mostly showing them contempt, making her silence after the rape incomprehensible and her post-traumatic montage under the Friday night lights laughable. Lurie even traduces his one potentially interesting revision—that Amy’s Freudian challenge to David’s manhood follows her distant father’s death—by refusing to recognize the contradiction and privileges of the modern feminist who remains attracted to power, money, position and male protection. Lurie lacks the courage of psychological complexity and sexual ambiguity in Peckinpah’s siege, when Amy collaborates with her rapists outside the home until David manhandles her cooperation inside.
Still using wire-frame spectacles as a mark of egg-headed effeminacy (apparently the owner of a $100,000 Jaguar is neither a candidate for Lasik nor informed about contacts or new-fangled plastic lenses), Lurie conjures an image of an embattled Eisenstein Bolshevik. That’s meant to play into an over-obvious metaphor of the battle of Stalingrad, leading Lurie to stretch into unlikely games of chess with an unrecognized knight (which cannot be squared with Amy’s instantly petulant boredom). Lurie fantasizes David as an atheist hero besieged by Christian Nazi zombies. (So much for the screenwriter as deeply distracted researcher, as that simplistic dichotomy describes neither the crypto-Christians nor professed-pagan of WWII.)
When he’s finally feeling his oats, David defiantly puts on Zydeco music (instead of Scottish war pipes from the original) and cracker leader Charlie smiles and responds, “That son of a bitch has some man in him after all!” Nothing better illustrates Hollywood hypocrisy than this secret longing to be admired that way by people they so despise.
