Eyes opening up

"Straw Dogs" takes place when David Sumner (Hoffman), an American academic with grant money, and his stunning wife, Amy (George), are moving into her late father's place outside a rural town in Cornwall. Sumner has been paying a couple of local slackers to roof a garage and rid it of rats; he ends up hiring Amy's ex-boyfriend and his cousin as well, in hopes they'll finish the job.

Right from the start, this movie is about primal matters: Everything gets eroticized from the moment George's Amy leggily strides into view in a miniskirt, her braless chest bobbing in the breeze. She perfectly embodies the kind of woman who knows that her beauty is her power, especially in a hamlet where most of the girls seem to have married out, and the only local fixtures, apart from the farm workers and craftsmen, are the minister, the sheriff and the bartender.

The 20-year-old George isn't just a phenomenal object of lust here -- she's also a superb actress. She and Hoffman are marvelous and excruciating together -- opposites who attract and repulse. He has a hooded glance that contrasts with her wide-eyed exuberance, and he's as measured and manipulative as she is cocky and spontaneous. He doesn't seem to grasp what a mismatch they are, and how vulnerable it makes the both of them, individually and as a couple. Amy insists that all the workmen, and especially the former boyfriend, covet her. David's response is to act high-handed, like a cerebral version of the "man of the house," snubbing inquiries about his profession as if no one could possibly comprehend science and tossing money around as if it will buy him safety. Of course, he antagonizes everyone (including, deliberately, the genteel folk) and makes himself small in Amy's eyes.

David and Amy connect only fleetingly, in playful sex and games -- which, true to the film's gnarly complications, look like heaven to a nubile neighbor girl who spies on them. Everything in this movie is dramatized, beautifully, yet nothing is explained; David's jibes at Amy's immaturity, her taunts at his cowardice, can't be taken at face value, but as symptoms of each other's insecurities. Their needling grows dangerous when Amy parades topless in front of the workers, who siphon off their raging jealousy and malice for David by trying to guide him into a car wreck. The Sumners' pastorale closes with a squelch when someone hangs Amy's cat in their closet, which Amy sees as a test for David from her former boyfriend and his pals: "They want to show you they can get into your bedroom." Amy doesn't know for sure who killed the cat -- and the movie is full of people who are innocent of what they're accused of, guilty of worse things, or guilty with extenuating circumstances. But Amy knows how scary her ex-beau and his mates can be, while David persists in trying to understand them as a man among men. He accepts an invitation to go bird hunting with them -- not realizing it's a way to strand him in the countryside and leave Amy alone in the house.

Rather than proof of Peckinpah's machismo, the double rape that ensues is a stunning demonstration of his empathy. In the uncut film (available since 1998 on a wide-screen video from Anchor Bay) it's a horrific assault and an emotional crucible. The first rapist, her ex-boyfriend, rouses feelings and needs she can't control; it's neither a blow against feminism nor a denial of rape as violence that she eventually succumbs to him. The swift, surgical flashbacks to David making love to her evokes her sad confusion; the comic-pathetic cutaways to David shooting a bird out on the moor evokes his.

As if to ensure that the sequence can't be misread as an apologia for rape, Peckinpah introduces a second rapist and puts across Amy's agony as he sodomizes her -- an act blunted when censors snipped the scene after the second man appears. The element of torture was lost in the reediting. But no film has ever conveyed the scarring of rape as unsettlingly as Peckinpah does when David and Amy (too shamed to speak of the crime, too unsure of her husband's response) attend a church social the next night. Images of rape leap into Amy's mind as they pass the roofing-and-ratting crew gorging on the free ice cream and cake and sit down to watch the fatuous preacher's feeble magic trick and an amateur diva doing "Rigoletto." (David's intuitive protectiveness toward her at the social provides the film with a single blessed gentle moment.)

Even the siege that clinched the film's notoriety begins with a sexual cataclysm: The same young girl who has been peeping in on David and Amy, looking for safe sex in a rough town, tries to seduce the village simpleton, Henry Niles (David Warner). Like Lenny in "Of Mice and Men," he panics when he fears they may be caught -- and unintentionally kills her. She happens to be part of the same clan that has already violated David's house. When David and Amy swipe Henry with their car, David insists on bringing him home -- and harboring him when the girl's alcohol-fueled dad and his posse, who know she walked off with Henry but not that he killed her, start acting like a lynch mob.

Peckinpah sets up the final conflict so that it's not a rite of manhood but an eruption of frustrated energy on all sides; it's more akin to the explosive climax of "Taxi Driver" than it is to a Western showdown. Peckinpah knows alienation isn't solely an urban phenomenon; when the riled-up gang's patriarch clumsily murders the sheriff, triggering the last confrontation, even the more intelligent of the attackers feel -- well, that's it, we're all goners, accomplices to a drunk who killed the sheriff. Law to them is incomprehensible, to be avoided at all costs; at this point, the only thing that will cheer them up is someone else's funeral. They underestimate David, who fights them with everything at his disposal, from wire to boiling oil to a poker. But this pinnacle of horror is more a test of marriage than of manhood -- early in the sequence, Amy threatens to let the bloody thugs in. When not gaping at a burst foot or the closing teeth of a man-trap, you're studying Amy's and David's faces to see where the two of them are now.

The movie's obvious strengths derive from Peckinpah's artistry -- he captures a place so that lowering weather gets under your skin and muddy trails under your toenails, and he edits for a quickening heartbeat, setting images in your mind in small vignettes (like Henry's brother slapping him) that later echo profoundly in the midst of frenzy. But its enduring potency comes from its torrent of mixed and charged emotions. "Eyes Wide Shut" -- and the cooked-up debates surrounding it -- are only about sex in the head. Peckinpah gives you sex as a kick in the groin, a jolt to the brain and a shot to the heart.

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