When Sam Peckinpah gave us Dustin Hoffman and Susan George as newlyweds acclimating to life in the wife’s hometown in rural England, he made interesting points about the fear of one’s own roots and foreign cultures. The remake of Straw Dogs has pieces of that built in, but mostly it seeks to make the audience uncomfortable using the tried and true methods of the film’s iconic rape scene and a whole bunch of southern stereotypes standing in for the original British ones. Is it amazing that such cultural disparity exists in the US today? Not at all, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be exploited by putting four rednecks in a truck, and having them shoot both rifles and leers at the protagonists. Unfortunately, director Rod Lurie can’t deliver the narrative with the same gravity Peckinpah did, and the transplanting of the story into the Deep South didn’t help. Then again, neither did replacing Hoffman and George with James Marsden and Kate Bosworth, who struggle to make their situation feel real at all.
It’s been years since Amy (Bosworth) left her southern home behind to pursue a successful career as an actress, and it’s that success, along with her recent marriage to David (Marsden), a bookish screenwriter, that makes her return home a nightmare. First, Amy must contend with the resumption of the aggressive romantic advances from her ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), but then David complicates things by hiring Charlie and his lackeys (Rhys Coiro, Billy Lush) to repair the roof of Amy’s old family estate. The daily close proximity of Charlie, gives the old flame a chance to test the married couple’s relationship through both physical and emotional stress. Once the ball gets tolling, the fabric of Amy and David’s marriage begins to tear until it’s all hanging by a thread. A thread that Charlie and his friends are all too eager to cut, even if that means resorting to gruesome and vile methods.
Marsden and Bosworth aren’t horrible in their roles, per se, but neither of them really connects with the character. The disconnect wouldn’t be a problem in most films, but then most films don’t have a drawn out rape scene, and so to watch the film’s one effective actor (Skarsgard as Charlie) violate a two-dimensional protagonist, it’s hard to know what to feel. Obviously we should be outraged, but Amy has no depth in any fundamental way such that it makes Charlie’s act easier to accept. He’s not raping a character; he’s having sex with the space where a character was meant to be. He might be raping that space, but the forceful penetration of an empty space isn’t nearly as disturbing as that of a human being.
Anyone familiar with the original knows that its greatest asset is the gradually growing feeling of unease as the passive aggression sparks into outright antagonizing. The combination of atmospheric and relational tension gave the film everything it needed to heat up and then boil over in its final act, but Lurie apparently didn’t have the patience for that, and so the film jumps right into blatant hostility and male dominance issues. Marsden isn’t entirely out of place playing a more intellectual role (i.e. a writer instead of a mutant teamleader), but what should have been a submissive character comes across instead as merely affable and easy going. Where Amy is concerned, the character’s weakness remains the same from the original, but more noticeable with Bosworth finding it a harder time to fit within a character written as being unintelligent to a striking degree.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Four basic featurettes cover everything from the set design, to the cast, to the filming of the final confrontation scene. There was clearly a belief that recreating Straw Dogs should have caused more of a stir, but considering how the film missed its mark in almost every respect, both the featurette on that subject and the audio commentary with Lurie feel a bit self-important and equally ill-informed.
"Straw Dogs" is on sale December 20, 2011 and is rated R. Thriller. Written and directed by Rod Lurie. Starring Alexander Skarsgard, Dominic Purcell, James Marsden, James Woods, Kate Bosworth.
