August 28-September 3, 2003
screen picks
Straw Dogs (Fri., Aug. 29, 9 p.m., $8, Broadway Theatre, 43 S. Broadway, Pitman, N.J., 856-589-7519, www.exhumedfilms.com) Straw Dogs is rarely, if ever, mentioned without being described as "controversial," but that adjective, so diluted by overuse, hardly describes the fierce debate and outrage the movie still provokes more than 30 years after its initial release. Acclaimed as director Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece, the film was attacked by Peckinpah admirer Pauline Kael as "a fascist work of art," and was banned from video release in the U.K. until only a few months ago. Cutting right to the chase, as Peckinpah would surely appreciate, the lightning rod for Straw Dogs detractors is the infamous rape scene at the movie's center, where Amy (Susan George), who's returned to her native Cornwall with her nebbishy American husband, David (Dustin Hoffman), clearly begins to enjoy her violation at the hands of her ex-lover, Tom (Peter Vaughan). The scene, of course, is meant to provoke people, and Peckinpah lays the savage-man rhetoric on so thickly in the rest of the movie you almost have to wonder if he meant to push viewers in the other direction. (Or, as you might be tempted to put it, "Is this guy for real?") Peckinpah's great subject is invariably cited as violence, but he was equally obsessed with masculinity (which, in Peckinpah's movies, does amount to the same thing): David, who's fled unspecified troubles at his old university (keep in mind that the movie was shot in 1970, as antiwar protests were beginning to turn ugly), is a passive-aggressive mathematician who hires several gap-toothed locals (as broadly caricatured as the backwoods cretins of Deliverance) to fix up the cottage adjoining their house. Peckinpah lays the failed-man stuff on thick: When the workmen leer at Amy, she complains to her husband, "If you could hammer a nail, [they] wouldn't be out there."
Hoffman handles David's descent into primal rage with devastating precision -- the uptight self-consciousness that dooms so many of his performances provides a cutting tension with his brutal retribution -- and George's performance is so open and unmeditated it nearly makes the incredible credible. But here's the rub: Even if you buy the argument that Peckinpah saw David as the movie's true villain -- delivered as convincingly as it will ever be by Stephen Prince on the commentary track of Criterion's new DVD -- it doesn't make the movie any more emotionally credible. Even if you believe that Peckinpah conceived Amy's decision to lie back and enjoy it as a response to the cruel inattention of her husband's passionless intercourse, it doesn't make it any easier to swallow. Peckinpah is quoted as saying he wanted the scene to be tough to take, and wanted viewers, particularly men, to feel uncomfortable, but it's not discomfort so much as disbelief; it throws you out of the movie rather than pulling you in. David's tumble into vigilante rage has an air of resigned inevitability, as if to say, "We're all like this under the skin, so why bother fighting it?" No reason at all, except that the struggle against our baser instincts is practically a definition of civilization. It's that defeated quality that makes Straw Dogs such a bitter pill.
Mr. Show: The Complete Third Season ($34.98 DVD) After delaying the launch of the first Mr. Show collection for years, HBO has practically rushed out the second, thanks to robust sales from the show's devoted fanbase. The bad blood still festers, though; the listing of the original air dates is frequently interrupted by the notation: "HBO puts Mr. Show on hiatus for a week while they air a late-night sex show." But Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, the show's creators, are fair enough to spread the pain around: The set's chaotic audio commentary, somewhat haphazardly recorded in what sounds like Odenkirk's living room, is full of regrets and second thoughts. Odenkirk in particular isn't above saying things like, "I always thought of this as one of the worst sketches we ever did, and I was right." (Come on, fella: "Culture Hunt" isn't that bad.) Characterizing the show's brand of free-associative, unpredictable comedy is as impossible as ever, but it's worth pointing out that the new set contains some of the show's most memorable moments, including a musical version of COPS (featuring Cross' Ronnie Dobbs, star of the ill-fated Mr. Show movie), the Krofft brothers' parody, "Druggachusetts" and a conceptually brilliant Beatles parody called "The Fad 3," about a rock group that skips the recording process and merely releases photos of themselves. Christina Aguilera, call your agent.
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