Movie: Straw Dogs
Release Date: September 16, 2011
Studio: Screen Gems (Sony)
Director: Rod Lurie
Screenwriter: Rod Lurie
Starring: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard, Dominic Purcell, Laz Alonso, Willa Holland, James Woods
Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Official Website: Not Available
Straw Dogs is an intense film. There’s simply no two ways about it. What most people know about it is directly related to how disturbing and graphic it is. Not that I can hold that against them. The movie has had a long and very interesting history with censor boards. It’s been listed constantly on film sites as one of the most dangerous, or controversial films of all time. Behind all its controversy though, is it a great film? I would say yes.
As an entertaining revenge filled romp you would be hard pressed to do better. The crime in this film physically affects me every time I see it, it literally makes my skin crawl, and by the end of it you want Hoffman to mow down every townie motherfucker he can find. In this way the film is very similar to “Irreversible”. They are both revenge films and they both use the well tread method of revenge films to tell their story. They both just take it to the next level. “Straw Dogs” unlike “Irreversible” doesn’t seem to have any problems with vengeance. This is what makes the film stand out against an overly packed genre which boasts the likes of “Death Wish”, “The Brave One”, “Death Sentence”, and all 5 “Dirty Harry” films. All those films seem to have a clear cut morality. “Vengeance takes the soul” type themes to them, after all, how do they all end? With the hero standing over the corpse of the man he’s after, and giving away all that’s made him human up until then. In the “Dirty Harry” series Harry always throws his badge into the river, in the “Death Wish” series Charles Bronson is always forced to leave the state which separates him from his friends he was trying to save in the first place. Only “Straw Dogs” seems to think that the masculine act of revenge is therapeutic. At the end of “Straw Dogs” Dustin Hoffman finally has respect from his wife now that the one challenger to her heart is dead, and the respect of the town, because they are all dead. Wrong? Probably, but a completely satisfying end to a well made thriller.
As part of Sam Peckinpah’s oeuvre, “Straw Dogs” is strange to me. It’s obviously a comment on masculinity like Peckinpah’s other films, but this one has the added layer of masculinity gone too far. At the beginning of the film David Sumner seems more like the type of character that the Wild Bunch are trying to escape from. He’s a lot more at home in the role of land owner, railroad tycoon, or government stooge. He has no masculinity and thus is more laughable or pathetic at the beginning. The more villainous characters in the story seem to be more directly related to Pike’s band of deputies from the “Wild Bunch” who cackle manically as they strip the dead of their boots, yet they represent a more pure form of masculinity to Amy, David’s wife. They have the trouble of being too masculine in Peckinpah’s view. They take what they want for purely animalistic reasons. It would seem that Peckinpah blames David for many of the couple’s problems, even her rape. If David where more assertive, more masculine, then Amy wouldn’t be tempted by Charlie’s physical presence. Maybe Charlie and David would never have had the nerve to enter David’s house if he were a real man. This is what Peckinpah seems to be trying to get across. It’s not until late in the film when David begins defending himself violently that Peckinpah offers him all the cards of our sympathy. Amy begins outwardly choosing Charlie over him, she begins belittling him, and at one point even chooses the townies over him. Now we can comfortably be in David’s corner, now he is righteous. This movie functions as Peckinpah’s shout out to the generation of hippies, a generation that embraced his earlier film “The Wild Bunch”. Peckinpah, if we believe the film, saw them as pussies, and their stance against violence to be shallow. He wasn’t trying to say that violence was the answer, that’s not the message he wanted people to take away from this film or any of his others. If it was, then the character of Charlie in “Straw Dogs” would be a more likely protagonist. What he wanted us to take away was that honor and character were more important than anything, and in this world defending those two things would sometimes have to end in bloodshed.
No comments:
Post a Comment