James Marsden is no Dustin Hoffman and director Rod Lurie is no Sam Peckinpah. The remake of the controversial 1971 film Straw Dogs, contemporizes, Americanizes, and adds just enough Grindhouse/slasher effects while making things paradoxically safe and somewhat sanitized. A film that on first thought seemed beyond the scope of a remake, also happens to be rather entertaining and not without the philosophical content of its predecessor.
Marsden, as the Hollywood/Harvard screenwriter who moves with his actress wife to her hometown in Blackwater (get it?) Mississippi, is way too insipid and goody-two-shoes for the role and it looks like we’re headed for disaster….Enter his wife, Kate Bosworth as the local girl coming back home after making it as a TV actress, and, well, we’ve got a movie again. Bosworth recalls vintage Brigette Bardot for sheer sexpot quotient, and when the going gets rough, her considerable acting chops kick in and save the film from total Clicheland. When Marsden invites her ex-boyfriend Charlie and his redneck pals to fix their remote house’s roof, we’ve got a clash coming between Marsden’s outsider/intellectual and the homeboys’ cruder values and Bosworth is caught smack in the middle. While she’s out jogging one morning, Charlie and his boys in the pickup truck get a view of her that cause them to, er, leer. When Marsden responds to her concerns with, “Maybe you ought to start wearing a bra,” the tension between the couple begins to mount. Bosworth is utterly believable and her natural beauty begins to wane in favor of confusion, frustration,and eventually, pain, as she’s more and more caught in the web of Charlie and gang’s revengeful maneuvering.
James Woods is also around as the quintessential scary loco local. Makes the most vicious and intolerant type of this sort you can remember pale in comparison. His former football coach (in a town where football is everything) who acts like he still owns the town is genuinely around the bend and serves as the perfect catalyst for the violence to come. There’s a black sheriff, who has the difficult task of keeping the rednecks in line, and finally, there’s Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard, True Blood). Affectionately calls Amy nothing but “Amy Cakes”. Gives Marsden nothing but the most unctuous politeness, calling him “Mr. Sumner” at every turn before turning devious nasties against him and Amy behind their backs. Skarsgard gives the character nuance and enough charisma to start messing with our heads as we stay aligned with Marsden but only this much. Our real alliance is with Amy. She’s caught. Wants her husband to act more like a man and stand up to the turds’ bad behavior. With Peckinpah, the relative ethics of each side was even more even-handed. It’s now 2011, not 1971, and Amy clearly can’t, even for a moment, go so far as to align herself with the old boys as they abuse her, as was the implication in the original. Thus we have a remake more exploitative in its genre excesses with the one exception that Amy doesn’t for a minute accept Charlie’s horrible act. It’s either a softening of the message or a saner expression of it. Yet little is sane here. The tale of a meek man forced to get in touch with his own savagery is filmmaking on the edge no matter how you slice it.
We’re allowed to not hate ourselves when Marsden goes nuts and we root him on like he’s a Navy Seal going after Osama Bin Laden.
5.5 Blackwaters (out of 10)
