Plastic Straw Dogs

Rod Lurie's an interesting guy. He's been a soldier, an investigative reporter, a critic, and the usual batch of filmmaker credits: producer, writer, director, all of these verging on political activist with films like Deterrence, the almost-great but deeply flawed The Contender, and the upcoming first-amendment thriller (one of my favorite subgenres) Nothing But The Truth.

He also seems like a fairly intelligent man. That said, his decision to remake Sam Peckinpah's 1971 arguable classic (I'm in the "yes" camp) Straw Dogs seem a little iffy. Like Last House on the Left, it's a grim, violent movie still capable of shocking today, and as such, not particularly in need of updating or revisiting. More puzzling are Lurie's comments on the movie, which he calls lazy, lesser Peckinpah, calling the movie "slow" and its themes "murky."

The pace and murk are both absolutely crucial to the meaning of Straw Dogs. I'm not going to go into a specific change Lurie speaks about, because it spoils a crucial moment of the film, but if you've already seen Straw Dogs, you can read about it here. Suffice it to say Lurie's cited change (he's writing it himself) indicates that he either misunderstands Peckinpah's gist or disagrees so strongly that he can't bring himself to maintain it - but then why remake Straw Dogs? Revenge actioners seem to be the order of the day (at my last theatrical jaunt, the Death Sentence preview was immediately followed by the preview for The Brave One); surely, enterprising writers will have sufficient scripts flooding the market in the next couple of months (who has the remake rights to Thriller?). Lurie could have his pick. Straw Dogs can be called a lot of harsh things - Joshua Clover calls it "fucked up" in his opening paragraph, and this is in a strong defense of the piece - but it's the murkiness of the themes that makes it worthwhile.