Word: peckinpah
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Love is nigh-impossible in the "modern" Cornish village of Straw Dogs, a place certainly as tortured as Bergman's islands. The complexity of modern life is what obscures man's basic, irrational problems, and there is no way a man can test himself now on all levels--as Peckinpah feels necessary for any man's development. So Peckinpah looks at his modern characters cynically, finding them passionless and without realidentity, not liking their size or their traumas. But he keeps his romantic ideals in the background, revealing them in sudden peaceful moments, in the manner David shelters a queasy...
...Peckinpah could have made a great film if he worked as broad a canvas as he's used to. He clearly feels that both the church and an amorphous state represent attempts only at making problems more palatable. Their representatives here are a noxious minister and an ineffectual sheriff, both of whom accomodate violent types into their closed systems, without giving them any alternatives to their conduct but supernatural imagery and good manners. But this point of view doesn't hold water by itself, even in a film whose director only films what he believes. We must know more...
...Since Peckinpah fails to give setting and plot sufficient weight, he must rely on characterization to a greater extent than he ever has before. Sadly, despite some embarassing attempts at suggestively hole-filling dialogue (we learn that Amy thought David uncommitted in the States, and that's that), we don't know Peckinpah's characters one-fifth as well as we do Bergman's at their most obscure...
...Peckinpah has still captured the feel of the Cornish coast, its lowering weather and muddy roads and cobbled walks. And his examination of violence is no more dishonest than the tensions of the characters that commit it. I don't think he's pandering to or bullying his audiences, that he wants to terrify the virtuous, make the thugs feel good, and give everyone else a charge. For, if you force yourself to look at that bursting foot, or Amy's bloodied face, or the battle shots of a fagged-out David taking one final swipe with a poker--cold...
...Peckinpah has also successfully planted intriguing questions which make the mind consider the narrative while the action lunges forward--something else new for him. Who really killed the cat, for example? That question may color the way you look at the entire film. But Peckinpah hasn't resolved anything enough to make us understand how Amy. David and the mob finally measure up in his eyes...