Film review: 'Hounddog' don't hunt like it should

Empire Film Group

Dakota Fanning takes a controversial role as a young backwoods heroine in "Hounddog."

Even before the Elvis-themed "Hounddog" debuted last year at the Sundance Film Festival, it had been identified as "the Dakota Fanning-gets-raped movie" by media outlets looking for juicier controversies in Park City than whether the festival encourages commerce at the expense of art.

Empire Film Group

Dakota Fanning takes a controversial role as a young backwoods heroine in "Hounddog."

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Movie reviewer John Beifuss reviews "Hounddog","Ghost Town","Baghead" and "Man On Wire." Watch »

Hounddog

In rural Alabama in the late 1950s, a spirited young girl, Lewellen, struggles to rise above the repression that surrounds her. Lewellen lives with her ...

Rating: R for a disturbing sexual assault of a young girl, and brief sexuality

Length: 93 minutes

Released: September 19, 2008 Limited

Cast: Dakota Fanning, Piper Laurie, David Morse, Robin Wright-Penn, Jill Scott

Director: Deborah Kampmeier

Writer: Deborah Kampmeier

More info and showtimes »

The (rather discreetly handled) rape of the character played by the 12-year-old Fanning is disturbing, but it's not as surprising as the movie's unreconstructed racial attitudes or its deadpan, cartoonish portrayal of the lightning-struck, rattlesnake-bit, tick-infested, 'shine-swallerin', white-trash denizens of the humid 1950s Deep South.

After the bad reviews and bad publicity (some religious groups said Fanning's mother and agent should

be charged with abetting child pornography), "Hounddog" failed to land a distributor at Sundance, and seemed destined to go straight to DVD. But 20 months later, here it is in theaters, although (so far) only in theaters in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Memphis. (The Bluff City apparently made the cut because it is the city of Elvis and also the home turf of talented young Germantown actor Cody Hanford, now 13, who plays Fanning's friend, "Buddy," in the film.)

Stung by the hostile criticism, writer-director Deborah Kampmeier has re-edited "Hounddog" since Sundance, to make it clear that sexual abuse has a traumatic effect on her barefoot backwoods urchin heroine. Kampmeier also writes at length about her purpose in the movie's press kit. For example, she lists the movie's nine "themes" (pretentiously identified by lowercase Roman numerals); these include "(i) darkness into light," "(vi) fecundity of the feminine" and "(vii) snake medicine." ("The church has done to snakes what it has done to female sexuality," the director writes. "It has made them evil and dangerous." This is not the kind of talk that is going to get the North Carolina chapter of the Concerned Women for America off your back.)

Unfortunately, the re-edit hasn't just dulled the movie's provocative edges, it's made the film duller. After I saw the film at Sundance with a crowd of hooting critics, I thought the Lafe Crick-meets-Lolita excess and unintentionally comic Southern-fried jackanapery of "Hounddog" was sort of entertaining, in a campy, weird way. Now the movie just seems weird.

Beautifully photographed, "Hounddog" begins at the ol' swimmin' hole, where Elvis-crazed Lewellen (Fanning) promises to give Buddy a kiss if he'll show her his "thing."

The kids part, and Lewellen makes her way home through a landscape of abandoned cars, buzzing locusts and the occasional cur. (The scenery makes Tobacco Road look like Park Avenue.) At her shack of a house, she discovers her daddy (David Morse) and his latest girlfriend, whom she colorfully refers to as "Stranger Lady" (Robin Wright Penn). "Do Elvis for us, baby," daddy coos. So Lewellen grabs a shadeless floor lamp and sings "Hound Dog" into the bulbs as if she were holding a stand-up microphone; she gyrates her pelvis rather disturbingly, in the manner of the boy who sings the "Viper" song in Nathanael West's "The Day of the Locust."

But "there's more to singing than just Elvis," counsels the film's most problematic character, a wise old black stablehand named Charles (Afemo Omilami) who gives Lewellen a course in Rhythm & Blues 101. "Elvis is a white boy singing black music," he says. "I just want you to know, there's more to fill up all that emptiness with than just Elvis." Later, Charles takes Lewellen to a private hayloft jam where the vocalist is none other than Big Mama Thornton (neo-soul singer Jill Scott), belting out "Hound Dog" just as the little girl arrives. "She's singing Elvis!" says Lewellen, scandalized. But Charles sets the record straight: "She hit No. 1 with 'Hound Dog' in 1953, long before Elvis sang that song."

In addition to functioning as an early version of Allmusic.com, Charles serves the poor but decent white folk of the vicinity as a sort of sexless and unthreatening combination of Dr. Phil and Rachael Ray. He fries up the rattlesnakes he kills in the barn so they won't go to waste ("You make good of the dyin', spirits fly free," he explains), and he tells Lewellen she "don't have to shake" like Elvis when the girl delivers her climactic, redemptive, Cowboy Junkies-style slow-simmering a capella reading of "Hound Dog." He gives Wright's character some healing counsel, too: "Maybe you finally be puttin' your arms around yourself the way your mama never could."

All elbows and knees, Fanning is a confident performer who handles her difficult role with panache. Other actors have less to work with, including Piper Laurie, who plays a mountainous hag of a "grammie" who tosses lit firecrackers into her truck patch to scare away the crows. Laurie gets the movie's most risible line, when she shows up at Lewellen's door with bad news: "It ain't no time fer yer hidin' games!" Grammie shouts. "Yer daddy's been struck -- by lightnin'!"

"Hounddog" is playing exclusively at Malco's Ridgeway Four.

-- John Beifuss: 529-2394

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