Very Brief Thoughts on Straw Dogs (2011)

Very Brief Thought #1: From what I can tell, Rod Lurie walked away from Sam Peckinpah's controversial 1971 film Straw Dogs with the sole thought that Peckinpah must have really had some pretty significant beefs with rural England, a position, while oddly specific and seemingly incongruous when coming from a very Old West-focused man from Fresno, CA, that was not unlike Lurie's own sniffing, self-righteous disdain for the American South. That's my guess anyway, because in Lurie's remake of the Peckinpah film the whole idea seems to be that the South is pretty fucked up, and has it coming. What Lurie seems to have failed to notice about the original movie is that Peckinpah's English village of Cornwall isn't overly specific -- Peckinpah includes what you might expect, such as pubs and pints and some hunting and little details of small-time life, but there is nothing there to imply that anyone is meant to think "This is what all those places are like." Lurie's South in his Straw Dogs, however, includes, yes, hunting, and also high school football and revered ex-coaches and church before football, and of course religious hypocrisy, casual racism -- in short, everything people who aren't from the South think are the only things Southerners do or have or talk about. And Lurie wants you to know he's not afraid of it. Or not anymore.

Very Brief Thought #2: James Marsden plays David Sumner in the remake, smarty-pants city boy who has moved from Liberal City with his wife, back to her backwoods hometown in search of peace and quiet. This time around, David is still an intellectual, but in keeping with our theme of Hollywood self-absorption, he's not a mathematician -- because writing about math is sort of hard -- but a Hollywood screenwriter. He's writing a film about the Battle of Stalingrad, so that's pretty intellectual I guess. This leads to some of my favorite moments, such as the idea that the battle took place in 1943, but ignorant people think it was 1944 (actually the bulk of it took place in 1942, but never mind). Even better is when David looks up at Amy (Kate Bosworth) and happily announces "I've figured out how to get Khruszchev in on the action. He's going to be Yuri's friend." Yuri, presumably, is the hero of his screenplay. So his big idea to make Khruszchev a part of his film is to just make him the main dude's friend. And how long did it take him to come up with that? Regardless, I smell Oscar.

Very Brief Thought #3: Speaking of religion, and Russia, at one point, Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), who is the main villain here, the former beau of Amy and head of the roofing crew David hires to patch up their barn, asks David if he doesn't think that God had something to do with helping the Soviets win the Battle of Stalingrad. David wonders at the absurdity of God helping an atheist country. This is about as far as Lurie's theological thought is able to take him. And following Lurie's metaphor to its logical conclusion, if David is the far-Left atheist under siege, then Southerners are Nazis.

Very Brief Thought #4: I happen to like James Marsden. If a good remake of Straw Dogs could have been made, or if Straw Dogs had never been made in 1971 and it was being made, and made well, for the first time now, I would see no reason not to cast him in the lead. Based on seeing Lurie's film, I still think that. And I used to think I liked James Woods, too, but after watching this film I'm not so sure about that anymore.

Very Brief Thought #5: It had been my assumption, going into this remake, that Rod Lurie would skitter, like a tiny kitten startled by a wind-blown leaf, away from all of the original film's highly uncomfortable elements. Peckinpah's film is one of the few films genuinely built to work on an audience's beliefs like they were a bundle of raw nerves. Any time you think you can comfortably find your spot within the film's morality, Peckinpah rubs your nose in the part of the mess you forgot you had to contend with. My confidence in Lurie's cowardice is based on having seen Lurie's 2000 film The Contender, which is one of the most snivelling, weak-willed pieces of self-righteous horseshit I've ever seen. You can practically see The Contender nervously straightening its tie as it tries to figure out how to get away from all the things it's said that it now wants to take back. It's so cowardly that it bleats on about how a vice presidential candidate's college sexual experiences are immaterial to their ability to serve in that office, and then assures the audience at the end that, don't worry, we thought all that sex stuff was pretty gross too, don't worry, she didn't really do that. If she had, she should still be vice president, but isn't it better to know she didn't? We can congratulate ourselves for not caring one way or the other, but at the same time we don't have to picture it.

So. But much to my dismay, in Straw Dogs Lurie does not entirely flee from what Peckinpah hath wrought. He flees from it enough to make a difference, but, for instance, David is still kind of an asshole. He's still in denial about his own fear. Lurie does recreate the rape scene, and if you squint hard enough it might make you uncomfortable in the same way Peckinpah's did, sort of, almost. Jeremy (Dominic Purcell), the mentally handicapped man who is ordered to stay away from young girls, does actually, accidentally, kill the young girl, which sets up the whole ending siege. One notable exception in all this is the complete rounding off of Amy. The rape makes her angry, and David still doesn't know about it, but her anger and fear doesn't lead her to want to chuck the handicapped guy out to the wolves. The furthest Lurie is willing to go by way of making Amy somewhat prickly and human is to have her ask David why he won't give Jeremy over to the rednecks. He tells her why, and she says okay. The tension between David and Amy during the siege, which in Peckinpah's film has the effect of separating David from everybody, including those he's trying to protect, is completely gone. Lurie portrays a household defending itself, instead of Peckinpah's one man scratching and clawing and clubbing everything he sees and once believed in. So in Rod Lurie's movie, a lot of the same things happen. But who gives a damn?

Very Brief Thought #6: The part where Rod Lurie actually has poor James Marsden use, and explain, the phrase "straw dogs" is one of the shit-stupidest things I've ever seen.

Contrarian Days

I watched a couple of movies today that were, from what I gathered, generally well and truly hated. Maybe "not well liked at all" is a more precise description, but either way they both got stomped on, but good. And then I watch them, and I like them both. To varying degrees, and for various reasons, and with qualifications, some of them massive. But still: either I'm going soft, or you're all a bunch of stupid morons.

The shameful truth about The Box and me is that I kind of wanted to hate it. Even without yet having seen his previous film, the infamous Southland Tales, I've come to the decision that I really dislike Richard Kelly. He's said a lot of obnoxious things in interviews, about his "neo-Marxist" political views and his views on writing, and his response to the critical shellacking he received following Southland Tales essentially amounted to "If you don't like my movie, then you're old." So the fact that I did end up admiring the film, to a point, I guess means that I'm positively busting with integrity, but I'm not even going to mention that, as it would be crass.

Based on Richard Matheson's famous short story "Button, Button", The Box tells the tale of Norma and Arthur Lewis (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden), and the offer made to them by Arlington Steward (Frank Langella). Steward gives the couple a box, inside of which is a red button, enclosed in glass. If the button is pushed in the next twenty-four hours, someone who the Lewises don't know will die, and they, the Lewises, will be given one million dollars. If they choose not to push the button, Steward will retrieve the button, and go on his way. Their dire financial situation having been established, Diaz pushes the button about a half hour in, and this, by the way, signals the end of Kelly's Matheson adaptation, and the hour and half that follows is pure Kelly.

For better or for worse. The better is that there is a great deal of strangeness that Kelly squeezes out of Matheson's premise, and his own extrapolation of it: mysterious kids, random nosebleeds, a city-wide rise in domestic violence, NASA, Mars, lightning...what do any of these things have to do with each other? The first hour of the films at times feels like the stage is being set for something truly bizarre and mysterious, and the second half pays it off, or tries to, although the core pay-off -- the meaning behind it all -- has been cribbed from any number of earlier SF films (most of which cribbed it from one very famous movie, the title of which shouldn't be revealed as it would constitute a spoiler), and The Box's strangeness goes from intriguing to a trifle desperate. When Kelly wrote the section of the film that ends with Marsden suspended above his wife, who is at home in bed, in a pool of floating water, which then comes splashing down, I imagine he must have thought: "What the fuck am I doing?" And then he looked at the calendar, and then the clock, and thought: "It'll work. It'll work. It'll work. It'll work." Over and over again until he nearly believed it himself.

The second half, in general, is just loony, not to mention clumsy. In fact, clumsiness doesn't always cut it. At one point, James Marsden leaves a party due to illness, and as he steps outside another character, played by Ryan Woodle, approaches him with a gun, and tells him to get into a car, which Marsden does. After Woodle's character has revealed his intentions, Kelly cuts to a scene of another character being kidnapped. Then he cuts back to Marsden and Woodle, and Woodle says "They just kidnapped [character we just saw being kidnapped]." Well, how the Christ does he know that? Shouldn't Woodle have approached Marsden after we saw that other person get kidnapped, so that we could have inferred that Woodle either witnessed or was informed of the kidnapping before he talked to Marsden? As it plays now, Woodle and Marsden were already on the road by that time, so he couldn't have known this. Yes, we will learn that Woodle's character would have had a very good reason to suspect that such a thing would happen, but that's not what he says. He says, essentially, "Hey, they just kidnapped so-and-so." Like, "I just heard it on the radio that..." or "I was just watching the dailies earlier, and..." or "Richard Kelly wanted me to tell you..."

The Box is many things. It's part of a superb SF/horror film. It's also a paranoid thriller, as well as a surreal, existentialist nightmare. And it's also the kind of movie that uses an image of the World Trade Center, because that's the kind neck-breaking strain boneheads like Kelly put themselves through in their shallow bid to claim significance for their work. But I'd be lying if I said that I didn't feel it was mostly those first three things. What The Box thinks it's up to, I have no clue, but when it's not being either very good or very bad, it's pleasantly baffling. And possibly, I've become too forgiving.

Gentlemen Broncos, meanwhile, was absolutely rent asunder by critics last year, and this disappointed me because, despite my aggressive indifference towards Hess's Napoleon Dynamite, the premise of this new film struck me as something I wished I'd thought of: a young man who aspires to write science fiction professionally, attends a writers' workshop/getaway, at which one of the instructors will be a successful SF author who is our young hero's idol. That idol will read what our hero has submitted, and then plagiarize it.

The capacity for a merciless skewering of SF, both professional and amateur, as well as fandom, in this premise is incalculable. But then the reviews started coming out, as well as clips from the film itself, and everyone who'd seen the film seemed to agree -- and I was beginning to see their point -- that the SF that was described in this film, and the SF film within the film, was so far removed from any reality, bore so little resemblence to the genre as we know it, from any era or any nationality, that there was no possibility for satiric sting, no potential for self-recognition for us SF fans looking to laugh at ourselves, or each other, or to get all the inside jokes we felt sure Hess would lay throughout his movie, because, of course, there were no inside jokes. Gentlemen Broncos existed entirely in the world of Hess's brain, so any inside jokes would be appreciated only by him.

So then I watched the film, and I realized that what everyone was bitching about was that Gentlemen Broncos was not the film they imagined it would be when they read the plot synopsis (I know this, because I imagined the same movie). The fact that Hess had no interest in satirizing, or even somewhat aproximating, actual science fiction, as we experience it in the real world (there's an irony there, I think) doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody. Or if it did, they didn't care, because they knew the movie they wanted to see, and this wasn't it.

Each of Jared Hess's films have been pitched at the same level of grotesque deadpan. The man is not a realist. I don't know if this was lost on the many fans of Napoleon Dynamite, but it's a style that has been falling out of favor with those fans ever since. The point is, none of his characters are meant to be believed, in the sense that we might expect to meet some version of them in our daily lives. But they are meant to be believed in the kind of world that might contain them all. Presumably, that world would also feature forms of entertainment; possibly, this would include some version of science fiction. If so, then the science fiction found in a world population by Napoleon Dynamite, Uncle Rico, Don Carlos, and Dr. Reginald Chevalier is going to look like this:

You'll notice I haven't spent any time trying to convince anyone that Gentlemen Broncos is a good (not great -- nobody ever said "great") and funny movie. I can't do that, so I won't even try; the film is too off for me to muster that kind of argument. All I'm saying is, if you watch it, let it be the movie it is, and don't worry about the movie you thought it was going to be.

Of course, if you don't think Jermaine Clement as Dr. Chevalier gives one of the great comic performences of the last several years, then I have nothing to say to you.