Straw Dogs (2011)

Rod Lurie's 2011 restaging of Straw Dogs moves the action from Cornwall to rural Mississippi, which is the sort of decision a director makes when he wants the audience to feel something without going to the trouble of earning it. The Southern Gothic furniture is all present: the church barbecue, the pickup trucks, the barn roof that will never be finished. James Marsden plays the screenwriter who will not hit anybody, and the film spends ninety minutes punishing him for it. The thesis, such as it is, holds that a man must eventually become an animal. This is not a moral position. It is a weather report.

The film's social consciousness is thin and mostly decorative. The cast is close to uniformly white, with Laz Alonso drifting through a handful of scenes as a sheriff's deputy whose narrative function is to be shot. Race sits in the frame as texture, never as argument, and the film has no interest in saying anything about the place it has chosen to set itself down in. Jeremy Niles, the young man with an intellectual disability, is bullied for two acts and then used as the mechanism that detonates the climax, which is not a portrait so much as a fuse. Amy, played by Kate Bosworth, endures two assaults and is later handed a shotgun. The film does not criticize the men around her. It simply films them.

What remains is craft and carnage. The nail gun, the bear trap, the boiling oil: Mr. Lurie stages the home invasion with real competence and no editorializing whatsoever. Roger Ebert preferred this version to the original, which is a generous reading of a film that mostly proves a remake can be competent and still unnecessary. There is no lecture here, no lesson, no closing argument. Just a man standing over a broken body, announcing that he got them all. The film would like us to find that cathartic. We mostly find it tired.

Thematic tags: remake, book adaptation (source novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm).

{"thematic_tags": ["remake", "book_adaptation"]}

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{"review": "Rod Lurie's 2011 restaging of Straw Dogs moves the action from Cornwall to rural Mississippi, which is the sort of decision a director makes when he wants the audience to feel something without going to the trouble of earning it. The Southern Gothic furniture is all present: the church barbecue, the pickup trucks, the barn roof that will never be finished. James Marsden plays the screenwriter who will not hit anybody, and the film spends ninety minutes punishing him for it. The thesis, such as it is, holds that a man must eventually become an animal. This is not a moral position. It is a weather report.

The film's social consciousness is thin and mostly decorative. The cast is close to uniformly white, with Laz Alonso drifting through a handful of scenes as a sheriff's deputy whose narrative function is to be shot. Race sits in the frame as texture, never as argument, and the film has no interest in saying anything about the place it has chosen to set itself down in. Jeremy Niles, the young man with an intellectual disability, is bullied for two acts and then used as the mechanism that detonates the climax, which is not a portrait so much as a fuse. Amy, played by Kate Bosworth, endures two assaults and is later handed a shotgun. The film does not criticize the men around her. It simply films them.

What remains is craft and carnage. The nail gun, the bear trap, the boiling oil: Mr. Lurie stages the home invasion with real competence and no editorializing whatsoever. Roger Ebert preferred this version to the original, which is a generous reading of a film that mostly proves a remake can be competent and still unnecessary. There is no lecture here, no lesson, no closing argument. Just a man standing over a broken body, announcing that he got them all. The film would like us to find that cathartic. We mostly find it tired."}