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By John Demetry
Set in 1958, the year Cat On a Hot Tin Roof was made into a film, Stray Dogs features five characters on an Appalachian farm during an intense long day's journey into judgement night. The opening of the film slowly reveals Darla Carter's dilemma, positioning the other characters in terms of her decision to leave Carter Mountain with or without her husband, Myers. We are introduced to the peculiarities of her two sons. The eldest, twelve-year-old J. Fred constantly recites a quote from The Bible, initially a sign of his immersion in the teachings of the Church of God. Eventually, we come to understand this as a pathological mechanism to deal with the instability of his family life. J. Fred uses pious pronunciations to control eight-year-old Reese's wildly nihilistic behavior, a sign of the lack of a father figure to help direct his energies. When Reese gleefully detonates an anthill, J. Fred explains that that work should be left to their father. Then, J. Fred stops Reese from ripping the eyes out of a dead rabbit so that he can look through them and see at night. J. Fred contends that only God can do that. At first, their father is off-screen, yet very present, dipping in and out of their small farmhouse to avoid Darla but also looking for the money he believes she has stashed away. The father figure who is present is Myers' sister, Jolene. A butch woman who works the farm she has inherited, Jolene represses her desire for Darla with her religious beliefs. She submits to "God's plan," and tries to convince Darla to stay on Carter Mountain and to count on the farm to support her and her children, despite Myers' having lost his job in town. The decision isn't so simple for Darla, who is pregnant with a girl. Her first three daughters all died shortly after their birth, because the Church of God does not allow for doctors. She won't lose another one, and she seems to feel that the Carter Mountain curses the girls born to it. The symbolism might have been too thick, if it weren't so densely thought out. The same curse infects the living as well as the dead.
The very existence of Jolene is an affront to Myers. She knows it. She hides her intelligence and her sexuality from him - and even from herself. When he challenges her to a childhood game of naming the books of The Bible, she caves in to let him prove his superiority. As Jolene, Dot-Marie Jones gives a careful, interior performance, subtly trying to sway Darla into staying on Carter Mountain and positioning herself as the father in the family while shrinking before Myers' accusations of perversity and his mounting violence. Jones makes Jolene as bound up as her long, curly red hair, which, when let down, reveals an unexpected sensuality. It's a necessary change to bring a queer character in a Southern Gothic out of the closet. I think it's foolish to read Blanche in Streetcar or Brick in Cat as coded queer characters. Those plays were really about the way a queer person - already dead - exploded their conceptions of the world. Crouch allows us to see that in dramatic action, which humanizes the queer character. It's painfully clear in Jolene's interactions with the two boys. Both of the young actors are best in their scenes with Jolene. As Reese, Zach Gray pulls off the most astonishing line in the movie. "I wish you were our daddy," Reese says to Jolene. It's a beautiful moment because Jones and Gray project regret and hope in imaginative sync.
This combination of juicy actors' roles and sexual repression clearly marks a relationship between this film and the tradition of Southern Gothics, but it also signifies a theme brought to the fore, the dynamics of a family. Clearly cast in part for her Liz-Taylor, Maggie-the-Cat beauty, Guinevere Turner gives Darla the bitter, defensive sarcasm of Patricia Neal in Hud and the manipulative sexiness of Carroll Baker in Baby Doll. She adds to those archetypes' sexual and monetary motivations a conflicting maternal imperative. She must save her unborn daughter - and her two sons. When the dust settles, that's what pulls her through. Stray Dogs is an actor-centered film, as were the Southern Gothics that inspired it. Crouch's depth-of-field atmospherics give the actors room to perform, to build their own rhythms, as in a long take when Turner and Jones move from confession to flirtation to disappointment - one of the tangled power struggles drawn out as a tight cord. Crouch's inquisitive style examines the process of performance - of actor-character symbiosis - while also imagining the characters' mindsets. A convention of the theatre, the hunt for stray dogs, also happening that night, is unseen. A lesser director would have imbued the hunt with random symbolism (like the killing of the cattle in Hud), but Crouch examines the way the characters give the hunt individual meaning through her delicate stylistics. When J. Fred recites his "Bible" quote while walking around Carter Mountain with his dog, Crouch makes the transition into a poetic slow motion when J. Fred sees a group of the hunters and hurries his dog away. In her brilliant short film, One Small Step, Crouch used the first moon-landing to contrast the aspirations of the central little girl (like Jolene, she wants to be a Daddy) and the aspirations her parents have for her. That piece of shared history also elucidated audience aspirations. The hunt for stray dogs can't really do that, so Crouch's use of Southern Gothic tropes acts as a popular reference point. Stray Dogs works off the way Southern Gothic films provided pleasure while also tapping into -- and sometimes providing enlightenment about -- confusions concerning gender, power, sex, illusion, and human frailty and strength. A self-professed "feminist filmmaker," Crouch incisively details the way the illusion of male entitlement constrains the characters. To stray means to be in danger because it breaks the illusion. The precise, distinctly American, nature of that illusion is defined in Myers' mantra: "The law of God and the law of the land." Manifest Destiny acted out in the fate of one family. Don't mistake Stray Dogs for a work of feminist agit-prop. Crouch's sympathies are magnificently even-handed. Her instinctive humanism displays an appreciation for the psychological effects of this core illusion on all of her characters. It mirrors the way audience enjoyment of the Southern Gothic films took very personal forms. People empathize with Stanley, Blanche, and Stella in different ways; there are plenty of seats on that streetcar named desire. Crouch has a more expansive, inquiring vision. She's the artist as stray dog. |
Guinevere Turner is Darla Carter 
Ryan Kelley (right, top picture) as J. Fred with Reese, played by Zach Gray 
© 1997-2002 BEI