Hounddog – Film Review | h Magazine's hmonthly.com

Hounddog – Film Review

Posted on 01. Sep, 2008 by Administrator in Film/TV

by Brent Simon

Hounddog first attracted acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007 as the movie in which a 12-year-old Dakota Fanning is raped. Nearly 20 months later, it’s finally seeing a theatrical release, with plenty of evidence as to the cause of its lengthy delay.

An amorphous blob of clichéd Southern gothic, where thunderstorms rumble portentously and there’s seemingly only one or two pairs of shoes in the entire town, Hounddog is a pretentious, mildly terrible period piece drama of random, falsely weighted dramatic signifiers and vaguely defined personal triumph. It’s the type of movie where air-quote catharsis is achieved by someone screaming, “Leave me alone, I hate you!” several times before finally
collapsing into their arms.

Written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier – who previously mined some of the same loosely related thematic territory with Virgin (about a pregnant teenager who has no memory of ever having sex, and is thus convinced she’s carrying the son of God) – Hounddog unfolds in rural Alabama in the 1950s. Young Lewellen (Fanning) lives with her stern, religious grandmother, Grammie (Piper Laurie, spinning a warmed-over variation of the same stiflingly overbearing nut-job that she delivered 30 years ago in Carrie), just up the hill from her absentee father (David Morse), a heavy drinker prone to disappearing for stretches of a couple days at a time and bringing home strange women, one of whom played by Robin Wright Penn.

Lewellen loves Elvis, and when she finds out he’s scheduled to make a stop in her small town, she makes plans to try to get a ticket to attend along with her friend Buddy (Cody Hanford). After the aforementioned rape by an older boy dangling the promise of an Elvis ticket, nearby neighbor Charles (Afemo Omilami, suffering the screen caricature of the “mystical Negro”) tries to help Lewellen get her spirit back by teaching her to tap into the blues. There are also a few obligatory third act revelations regarding a tangled family lineage, but they hold much more shrug than pop.

Other than its understandable unpleasantness, the brief and discreetly done rape sequence gives one no reason to quibble with Hounddog, which is far less provocative in this regard than literally a dozen similar films. And Fanning’s performance is fine; actually, the obvious faults of the movie don’t rest with her. Unfortunately, Morse doesn’t escape with his dignity intact, owing to a first-act plot strand in which he is struck by lightning and reduced to a grinning idiot.

Hounddog is gorgeously shot (cinematographers Ed Lachman and Jim Denault share credit), but the film’s mossy beauty soon wears thin, done in by characters who are broadly defined by race, socioeconomic class, a terrible wig, or some combination thereof. In Kampmeier’s mind it would seem these Jungian archetypes clearly hold some symbolic heft, but given their lazy deployment they actually come across as crass oversimplifications, and make Hounddog a bit offensive in addition to just being ridiculous. (Empire Film Group, R, 98 minutes, opens September 5.

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