'Stix Nix Prix Pic': The Bigotry of Rod Lurie's 'Straw Dogs' Remake

Gregory Solman in CityArts Forum:

The deserved box-office disaster of Sony’s Straw Dogs remake–the South, as well as everywhere else, rising up against this species of estranged Hollywood elitism–merits a variation on Variety‘s most famous headline: “Stix Nix Prix Pic.”

Filmmaker Rod Lurie’s benighted religious bigotry is matched only by flyover-country condescension and his seeming self-absorption: He swaps the sober middle class astrophysicist running away from Vietnam War campus tumult into what he thinks will be an English country idyll, into an insufferable sponsored character, a wealthy pseudo-intellectual screenwriter who moves to a place he neither likes nor respects to teach everyone there a lesson in atheistic, moralistic superiority.

Lurie bowdlerizes Sam Peckinpah’s unnerving, sophisticated 1971 psychodrama, which was itself freely adapted from source material by a British novelist, by applying the cheap theatrics of horror movies, so it finally has no resonance or plausibility. In contradistinction, Peckinpah’s work incisively contextualizes the American professor’s ’60s mid-revolution manhood-in-turmoil with Cornwall’s stubbornly retrogressive working class, which includes David’s (Dustin Hoffman) English wife Amy (Susan George). Exuding class distinction, she parades through her hometown brazenly braless, seeming to import ugly-American urban manners and embodying the threat of modern womanhood to economically emasculated men.

Peckinpah’s David dodges what the Englishmen see as “bombin’, riotin’, snipin’, shootin’ the blacks” for an escape into the peaceful, quiet cosmos of his mind. Lurie’s David and his possibly used-up television star wife moves from California to Mississippi for no discernible reason other than show-biz-kid showing off, only to sniff at cash-only bars and spotty cell-phone service and blackboard his siege-of-Stalingrad movie as if he’s the serious historian, not the Hollywood over-simplifier. One man discovers that he can’t go home again; the other learns he should have stayed home.

Lurie invents a modern all-white Mississippi–in reality over a third black–to suggest a segregationist backwater called Blackwater and lend the outsiders broadminded distinction. Using only black and white characterization licenses Lurie to show white devils toting Bibles while they rape and pillage and bully and molest feeble minded (and conveniently unsupervised) adults. It has been thoughtlessly contemporized, though talk of the Iraq war and post-Katrina FEMA money suggests remnants of an obliquely anti-Bush screenplay sitting in Lurie’s drawer since 2005.

You’ll want to read the whole thing.

More excellent deconstruction and analysis at CityArts on “Straw Dogs” here and here.