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.
Exposing Lurie’s Lurid Fallacies
The contrivances of writer-director Rod Lurie’s Straw Dogs remake stack up faster than the casualties at the Battle of Stalingrad. It begins with the recasting of the protagonist, David, from a mild-mannered mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) in Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 original to a Hollywood screenwriter (James Marsden). Peckinpah daringly directs audience identification to a square, while Lurie centers it on a showbiz hipster.
Susan George in 1971's Straw Dogs.
The unlikely marriage of Hoffman’s David to sexy, blond Brit Amy (the gorgeously vulnerable Susan George) makes psychological sense in the original. Returning to her English village reveals the sexual history that motivates her desire for a civilized and gentle American, while he defines his masculinity through his hot wife. The tension in their relationship that plays out during the course of the film stems from the insufficiencies of these motivations as the basis of a marriage. Peckinpah’s high irony: defending that civilization—represented by morality, home and law—requires a man capable of moral action and calculated violence.
In the new Lurie film, show business forms the foundation of the couple’s relationship. She’s bimbo actress Amy (Kate Bosworth), he’s her television writer (their relationship began when she demanded more lines). Surprisingly, this mutual exploitation causes no strife in their relationship. Instead, Lurie plants the seeds of marital discord when David reveals his misogyny, chastising her for dressing like a whore. She defends herself to the man who gives her more lines: “I dress for you, David!” (Indeed…) Lacking irony, it is simply not credible. Audiences who accept this also sanction Lurie’s reduction of Peckinpah’s complex intimacy.
Peckinpah did not ignore the real political world; rather, he dramatizes its interpersonal impact. In the 1971 Straw Dogs, David’s wife challenges his masculinity by accusing him of escaping to her English village in order to avoid the participatory political demands of Vietnam- and Civil Rights-era protest.
In the remake, the couple returns to Amy’s Deep South hometown so that David can finish his screenplay about the Battle of Stalingrad. Through this contrivance, Lurie juxtaposes David’s Blue State Liberalism against the denizens of Amy’s working-class Red State town—represented by a group of Bible-thumping and racist thugs. Lurie also establishes that there are dangerous and seductive leaders in the midst of the hicks through the character of mid-riff flashing Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), chief antagonist and Amy’s high school sweetheart. Blond and blue-eyed Charlie looks like a Hollywood heartthrob and knows the year of the Battle of Stalingrad off the top of his head (like a good Aryan). Lurie panders to the (intended) liberal audience’s “Tea Party” paranoia by tapping into its sexual envy.
Lurie assumes the pose of Leftist politics, but he pledges allegiance to Hollywood sentimentality. “It’s about the triumph of the human spirit!” David explains his apolitical approach to writing the Battle of Stalingrad screenplay. When Charlie and his gang—who will eventually rape Amy and lay siege to their home—challenge this bromide, one asks: “Don’t you think God had something to do with that?” David rationalizes: “Why would God help a nation of atheists?” Another answers: “God works in mysterious ways.” “Most dangerous line ever uttered,” David ends the argument. This bogus debate disguises how Hollywood narrative really does promote ideology—such as through this film’s assumed identification with its bourgeois protagonist. David gushes to his wife: “Khrushchev was a hero!” It reveals that he rejects Communist principles but values power.
Hack director Lurie muddles his mise-en-scene as much as his politics. Example: Amy watches Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday on the television when David discovers their cat, dead in the closet with a noose around its neck. Instead of montage, Lurie lazily films the wide-screen staging with a long lens, shifting focus to direct audience attention to Amy’s distraction or David’s horror. For those in the know, Lurie seemingly conflates their persecution with that of the blacklisted Holliday, but neither character can claim Holliday’s artistic or political integrity. Like his characters, Lurie recycles Leftist mythologies, using technique for shock effects rather than to raise spectator consciousness. Due to Lurie’s spatial incoherence, the big action climax merely piles on the gruesome violence (nail guns! boiling oil! a bear trap!). Following the failure of his previous liberal fantasies, such as the ludicrous Clinton apologia The Contender (2000), Lurie now remakes Straw Dogs to appropriate the gravitas of a film master.
In the original Straw Dogs, Peckinpah applies to a different milieu the stylistic innovations that he developed on Westerns (such as Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969)). He brings to the English countryside a compositional sense that visualizes the relationship between land and man, setting and society. Peckinpah’s command of film space establishes the layout of the couple’s home so that when it is under attack, the audience comprehends David’s strategizing. The auteur’s signature integration of slow motion and montage highlights character cognition, moral action and deadly consequences.
In the 1971 version, when David and Amy go to a church social following her rape, Peckinpah directs the dramatic sequence with the full weight of his action-style arsenal. He puts the spectator inside Amy’s perspective—to, among other things, make the audience feel her realization of the distance her assault has created between herself and her husband. Peckinpah’s construction of Amy’s point of view also honors actress George’s indelible emoting and psychological awareness. For a movie often accused of being sexist, the sequence should be regarded as a zenith in film feminism.
James Marsden, Kate Bosworth and Alexander Skarsgard in 2011's Straw Dogs.
Lurie sullies Peckinpah’s aesthetics with his version of the church social sequence, now set at a football game. Too obvious and self-serving in his critique of patriarchy, Lurie cross-cuts Amy’s flashbacks of the rape with the masculine aggression of the local football game. That perspective is more Lurie than Amy. Peckinpah’s David and Amy (and the village idiot David swears to protect) are the “straw dogs” of the title—upon whom evil and destructive forces descend. Now, Lurie’s David explicitly defines the high school football players as “straw dogs” who, like sacrificial idols, end up discarded by the town when they no longer serve their ritual purpose. However, Lurie’s “straw dogs” constitute—as Karl Rove recently deconstructed Obama’s rhetoric—“straw arguments.” By failing to dramatize the feminine and marital insight of the Peckinpah sequence, Lurie also abandons his actress. He leaves Bosworth to draw her expression of her character’s trauma from the director’s agitprop. That is not what guided the Soviets to victory at Stalingrad.
John Demetry analyzes contemporary film and reassesses cinema history for the post-9/11 audience in his book The Community of Desire: Selected Critical Writings (2001-2007) available at www.lulu.com.
