The original film holds its rank as one of the ground-breaking landmarks of violence in American movies. It was about a big-city intellectual whose wife is raped – twice – by rural idiots.
Even though it was released the same year as such other harbingers of violence as “A Clockwork Orange” and “Dirty Harry,” “Straw Dogs” still stands as one of the most violent films ever made.
The remake, one of the more unnecessary efforts in recent filmdom, keeps up the mindless violence of the original but switches the setting from rural England to the American South.
Peckinpah is hailed as a genius by some and as an anti-studio, anti-establishment icon by others. A genius? Maybe, but to one who hung around him on the set for a full day, he was mainly a raving drunk. With a red bandanna wrapped around his head, he raged at all in sight. It is a badge of honor that he once threw me off the set. I paid no attention because he threw everyone off the set, including the leading actors.
Rod Lurie, who directs the remake, is not in the same league as Peckinpah, which is not altogether a negative thing.
Peckinpah’s version, though, at least hinted at the important notion that there is a streak of violence lingering in all of us. Pauline Kael called the original “the first American film that is a fascist work of art,” and the rape scene got the film banned for more than a decade in England.
It is somewhat disturbing that the mindless, silly current version will stir no protests. The R-rated film’s high body count won’t draw even a suggestion of surprise from the 14-year-old boys who are not supposed to see it. Times have changed.
The main character in the original was a math guy played by Dustin Hoffman. Now he’s a writer, and James Marsden, a Hollywood pretty boy who was last seen opposite the Easter bunny in “Hop,” is a lightweight choice for the role.
Driving a Jaguar sports car, he accompanies his wife, a Daisy Mae type, back to her hometown of Blackwater, Miss.
While you hear a lot about biases – racial, political and gender – you don’t hear as much about the kind of geographic bias that the new “Straw Dogs” promotes. Yet again, the South is pictured as a place of subhuman, inbred idiots.
There is a scene in which it is suggested that the church is used primarily to encourage the violence of a violent God. Of course, the town idiot must be hidden or restrained.
Local folk don’t like strangers, especially the new husband of the former high school cheerleader played by Kate Bosworth.
Bosworth is cast as a somewhat sluttish version of the wronged wife. She slithers about in short-shorts in front of the bad ol’ boys who are repairing the roof of her barn. Just to be sure you get the idea, she bares herself in the window before the boys. (There is nothing subtle in Lurie’s version.)
The famous rape scene now has her attacked by the most muscular and handsome of the subhumans (Alexander Skarsgård from TV’s “True Blood”). Her reactions are even more in question than the character’s in the much-discussed ’71 original. Does she enjoy it, and, if so, was it rape? Does her intellectual husband have to sink to the level of the other idiots in order to prove himself a man?
Does anyone care? Not really.
The forgettable supporting cast includes an aging James Woods as the drunken local football coach (the low point of his career).
You can bet that if there is a close-up of an antique rifle or a bear trap early in the film, it’s going to surface. The finale is one of destruction that is so silly, it is neither threatening nor involving.
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Source : http://hamptonroads.com/2011/09/straw-dogs-regrettable-remake-forgettable-cast
