First Look: Rod Lurie’s Remake Of Sam Peckinpah’s Harrowing ‘Straw Dogs’
By Russ Fischer/May 3, 2011 7:00 am EST
We’ve not seen any footage from Straw Dogs, and in fact we’ve had a peek at barely any materials at all. So here are some of the first real images from the movie. They’re not wildly exciting — neither will give you any idea of how Rod Lurie has actually handled the remake — but they serve to remind us that the movie does in fact exist.
EW has the stills in a new issue, and ever-ready with the scanner, The Playlist passes them along. We’ll likely see better versions down the line, and hopefully this means that a trailer of some sort is in the offing.
Like the Sam Peckinpah original, this version is also based on the novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon Williams. We don’t know too much about this remake, other than that the action has been set in Louisiana rather than rural England. In the original, Dustin Hoffman is a mathematician who moves with his wife (a willowy, gorgeous Susan George) to her childhood home. Life in the small English village where she grew up is meant to be an intellectual retreat, but the boys of the village, grown into men, are pointedly interested in the woman their childhood acquaintance has become. There is a rape — one which is more controversial than most on-screen rapes — and things build to a violent head involving many men of the village. The film culminates in a long, devastating siege of the farmhouse where the couple resides.
So, the images. On the right in the gallery above are James Marsden and Kate Bosworth, likely as they travel from LA to Louisiana. And on the left is the lead antagonist of the film, played by Alexander Skarsgaard, and one of his friends/cronies, Rhys Coiro. The cast also includes James Woods, Dominic Purcell, Laz Alonso, Willa Holland, Anson Mount, and Walton Goggins.
Speaking to CHUD in 2008, Rod Lurie said this would not be a shot for shot remake, and specifically,
There are other statements in that interview that prove Rod Lurie didn’t take a cavalier attitude to making this film, but as to whether his movie will be compelling in and of itself remains to be seen.
Sam Peckinpah identified Dustin Hoffman as the ‘heavy’ of the film — the bad guy — because his character’s insecurity is what prods much of the action along. Is that how Rod Lurie has handled this version, which also casts the main character as a screenwriter, rather than a mathematician? And Sam Peckinpah’s alcoholism really became a dominant force during the making of Straw Dogs; it isn’t difficult to see some of the same self-identification between him and Dustin Hoffman’s character just as there was a link between Peckinpah and Warren Oates in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. There’s powerful stuff there that makes the original movie what it is. This movie might still be powerful, but how is an unknown.
