Suspense. R. 1 hour, 49 minutes.
“Straw Dogs” is an artful provocation — a meditation on masculinity and societal mores in the guise of an explosive thriller. While remaking Sam Peckinpah’s controversial 1971 classic, writer-director Rod Lurie (“The Contender,” “The Last Castle”) has kept the plot virtually intact.
What makes the two films feel radically different is tone.
Where Peckinpah was borderline nihilistic, Lurie is unabashedly humanist, simultaneously celebrating and mourning the primal savagery we all harbor within us — a savagery that has been lulled into dormancy by civilization.
James Marsden and Kate Bosworth, best known for comic-book movies (“X-Men,” “Superman Returns”) and comedies, both deliver career-high performances.
The story remains simple: Hollywood screenwriter David Sumner (Marsden) and his actress wife, Amy (Bosworth), relocate from the West Coast to Mississippi to restore and sell her family home.
The locals still remember Amy fondly, especially her ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), a former high-school football star whose greatest triumphs are behind him.
The trouble begins when the Sumners hire Charlie and his crew to fix their roof. The workers’ rude behavior — one of them walks in and takes a beer from the fridge without asking — gradually takes a toll on the marriage.
The men sense David’s emasculation: They can practically sniff it in the air, and they grow bolder in their transgressions. An aura of menace develops.
In Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” you watched the characters from a distance, like lab rats in a clinical study of marital dysfunction. In Lurie’s version, you genuinely like the Sumners and understand their union, so you feel the tension in your gut.
The new “Straw Dogs” climaxes with an eruption of extreme violence, and the sequence is both cathartic and corrosive. There is a great tragedy to the bloodbath, but there is great victory, too.
