Friday, September 16, 2011
David and Amy Summer, a Hollywood screenwriter and his actress wife, return to her small hometown in the deep South to prepare the family home for sale after her father's death. Once there, tensions build in their marriage and old conflicts reemerge with the locals, including Amy's ex-boyfriend Charlie, leading to a violent confrontation.
By Rene Rodriguez
Miami Herald
“Straw Dogs” is an artful provocation — a meditation on masculinity and societal mores in the guise of an explosive thriller. While remaking Sam Peckinpah’s controversial 1971 classic, writer-director Rod Lurie (“The Contender,” “The Last Castle”) has kept the plot virtually intact.
What makes the two films feel radically different is tone. Where Peckinpah was borderline nihilistic, Lurie is unabashedly humanist, simultaneously celebrating and mourning the primal savagery we all harbor within us — a savagery that has been lulled into dormancy by civilization.
On paper, James Marsden and Kate Bosworth seem like odd substitutes for Dustin Hoffman and Susan George: These young, attractive actors are best known for their work in comic-book movies (X-Men,” “Superman Returns”) and comedies. But their casting turns out to be a stroke of genius — so far removed from the stars of the original film that the inevitable comparisons are rendered moot. Marsden and Bosworth, delivering career-high performances both, make these characters their own.
The story remains simple: Hollywood screenwriter David Sumner (Marsden) and his actress wife Amy (Bosworth) relocate from the West Coast to her small hometown in Mississippi to restore and then sell her family home. The locals still remember Amy fondly, especially her ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), a former high-school football star whose greatest triumphs are behind him. The trouble begins when the Sumners hire Charlie and his crew to fix their roof.
In Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” you watched the characters from a distance, like lab rats in a clinical study of marital dysfunction, but you never related to them as people: They were strange and unknowable.
Much like Peckinpah’s film, the new “Straw Dogs” climaxes with an eruption of extreme violence, and the sequence is both cathartic and corrosive. There is a great tragedy to the bloodbath, but there is great victory, too. You can only push people so far before they break — or start to fight back. The conflagration that ends “Straw Dogs” is more triumphant than lamentable: Sometimes, you have to be taken to the edge of the abyss to find out who you really are.
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