Beyond the Multiplex

Jan. 24, 2007 | PARK CITY, Utah -- Sundance 2007 finally has a bomb. Every festival needs one. In recent days Deborah Kampmeier's film "Hounddog" has become the object of national curiosity based on reports that it featured a rape scene involving actress Dakota Fanning, who is 12 years old. The Catholic League even called for a federal investigation to determine if any child pornography laws were broken during the making of the film. No one there or anywhere had seen the film, of course. But it's every American's God-given right to hold a firmly fixed opinion about a cultural work he knows nothing about.

Naturally this attack on free expression aroused the interest (and prurient interest) of the media, which is why a passel of folks, yours truly included, packed into an overheated screening room here on Tuesday afternoon to watch that rape scene, and the other 97 and a half minutes of "Hounddog," for ourselves. The rape lasts 30 seconds or so, possibly less. If you nod off (a realistic possibility with this picture), you'll miss it. But it turns out the defenders of my ancestral faith are correct, if only by accident: "Hounddog" should be boycotted. Not because it depicts the sexual exploitation of children but because it's a turgid, overripe mess.

Fanning gives a brave performance under the circumstances, but she can't escape this hilariously bad late-'50s Southern Gothic, which vomits up huge chunks of undigested Tennessee Williams preserved in swamp gas. Every hackneyed symbol of Suthin' living is dredged up one more time: We've got magnolias and kudzu, we've got cicadas squeaking so loudly you can barely hear the dialogue. (Turn 'em up!) We've got oh-so-wise black folks singin' the blues and dispensin' folk wisdom. We've got Piper Laurie, dressed like a walking sofa, as the horror-show grandma with electrified hair, Bible in one hand and whiskey bottle in the other. We've got Robin Wright Penn (an actress I admire) drifting through the movie in her sexy-battered-vulnerable mode, wearing just a slip, a grimace and a shiner.

Then there are the snakes. My land, does this movie have snakes. Snakes in the river, snakes in the garden, snakes in the grass. We get it! Snakes coming through the windows. Snakes writhing all over the bed, at least in the dreams of Lewellen, the precocious young Elvis fan and would-be singer played by Fanning. We get it, already! Uncle! Snakes bite the wicked and the good alike; some survive and some do not. As Charles (Afemo Omilami), Lewellen's Wise Negro Protector, assures her, she's possessed of snake magic, which is the rarest and most difficult kind.

Lewellen's drunken and abusive dad (David Morse) is struck by lightning and rendered an idiot. (OK, he was an idiot before, but of a different kind.) She lives part of the time with him, part of the time with the aforementioned sofa-esque grandmother and occasionally with Ellen (played by Penn), whose relationship to her is obscure. Aunt? Mother? Stepmother? Adult sister? Some picturesque Southern combination of all four? I suppose Kempmeier thinks all this heavy-handed symbolism and bayou atmospherics is Faulknerian, even biblical. I can think of other words beginning with "F" and "B" that would be more fitting.

In fairness, Fanning comes through reasonably unscathed. She has an odd but appealing tomboyish luminescence about her that can carry some of the less ludicrous scenes. Even a sophisticated 12-year-old cannot be expected to understand how caricatured the film's presentation of place and time is. Despite spending much of the film in her underwear, she is never presented in a remotely sexualized manner. The rape scene is entirely nonexplicit; you see her face, her hands, her feet. Her teenage assailant is little more than a shadow in the darkness.

My real sympathy is reserved for Omilami. However benignly presented, Charles is just another in a long, dreary litany of singin', dancin', happy-go-lucky African-Americans with mysterious midnight juju, whose only agenda in life seems to be tending to the spiritual welfare of white folks. Even beyond that issue, the lines he must deliver are so execrable, the whole thing inches toward becoming a "Second City TV" sketch. He's constantly telling Lewellen that she must fill the hole inside herself. I kid you not. "Little missy, you got to fill that emptiness inside you with something besides Elvis!"

Which is just silly. I mean, isn't Elvis sufficient to fill the void inside all of us?

Seriously, I'm astonished that anybody would try to pass this movie off as artistically or socially meaningful in 2007. Did Sundance programmers actually watch it, or were they just swept up in a moonshine-sippin', guitar-pickin', cicada-chirpin', snake-slitherin' miasma?

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