- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 1971
- Countries:
- Predominant Genre:
- Thriller
- Director:
- Outstanding Performance:
- Premiss:
- A young American and his English wife come to rural England and face increasingly-vicious local harassment.
- Themes:
- Alienation | Compassion | Courage | Destiny | Empathy | Humanity | Identity | Loneliness | Loyalty | Mankind | Mercy | Narcissism | Personal change |
Self-expression | Sexism | Solipsism | White culture | White supremacy - Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Unknown
- Review Format:
- DVD
Get off my wife! Please?
Unusual film in that the ostensible hero of the work is also the villain.
The dramatic conflict is within the Dustin HOFFMAN character - a life-denying social snob - as to how to be a man. When confronted with the weakness of the insecure men with which he finds himself surrounded - despite his attempt to hide away from worldly matters - he finds his only recourse becomes to stand up for himself and to kill them!
Yet these ostensible villains are men of a truer nature who force the hero/villain to face the masculinity he wants so desperately to renounce. It is this aspect of the film and not so much the rape that makes for such disturbing viewing since this movie is an attack on a Western culture that approves of such emasculated males while simultaneously condemning them for not being man enough.
The weakness-is-a-provocation theme runs throughout this movie as the villains represent the repressed creatures finally emerging from the central character’s mind.
All concerned give strong performances, particularly Susan GEORGE as the sensually unsatisfied wife of the craven academic who seeks other men’s sexual attention, but refuses to face the tragic consequences that such titillating behavior can lead to. Her rape is really a punishment for liking sex and openly and liberatedly-asking for it from men who are not so liberated. That she is a feminist character marks her out as the most empathetic female in Peckinpah’s oeuvre.
Sam Peckinpah’s best films can be intensely uncomfortable and invasive; intent on tearing down the scrim of society to reveal the truth many try to evade. This is why they are never exploitations, but honest explorations - milestones in gender studies, indeed. The fact that Hoffman never realizes that his wife has been raped proves that his violence comes from within and not from a desire for revenge.
Ultimately, Straw Dogs is about a bad man so divorced from his humanity that he is cruel to his wife; comparing her to a child when she is lonesome and an animal when she is amorous. And yet he blames her for this detachment from himself that the conclusion to the movie only partly resolves. Those who do not like this film are examples of the Hoffman character’s nebbishness that Peckinpah successfully parodies.
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