Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.0

Hounddog Blu-ray Movie Review

The Rabbit Shrugged and Went Home

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 17, 2012

Maybe it's true that there's no such thing as bad publicity, but not all publicity helps a film draw an audience. Shooting was barely complete on writer-director Deborah Kampmeier's sophomore feature, Hounddog, before word spread that it contained a graphic rape scene featuring child star Dakota Fanning. When the film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2007, that sequence was all any journalist wrote about. If it had been part of a movie that enthused an audience other than the festival crowd (which happened, for example, with Boys Don't Cry), the film might have gone somewhere. But when it finally appeared in theaters the following year, it landed with a thud, taking in less than $111,000 at the box office.

The problem wasn't, as some have speculated, the scene involving an assault on Fanning's character. It was the rest of the film. Despite strong performances, rich atmosphere and painterly cinematography, Hounddog suffers from a wavering narrative that leaves the viewer unmoored and therefore uncertain how to respond to the unceasing parade of cruelties, disappointments and betrayals visited on its small protagonist. One might defend the film by responding that this is how life is (which, sadly, would no doubt be true), but it's obvious both from Kampmeier's comments and the plot's arc that she intended something more: a story of triumph over adversity, of unstoppable vitality overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Hounddog assembles the elements for such a story, but it never coheres.

In 1950s rural Alabama, young Lewellen (Fanning) lives with her Bible-thumping Grammie (Piper Laurie) and her hard-drinking Daddy (David Morse), who have neighboring shacks. Lewellen's mother (Grammie's daughter) died years ago, but Lewellen still keeps her picture. She comes home one day to find a strange woman, Ellen (Robin Wright), staying with Daddy, and an odd atmosphere has settled over both households. Ellen treats Lewellen with great familiarity, especially after Daddy falls into what appears, from Lewellen's reaction, to be common behavior with his girlfriends and gives Ellen a black eye. Eventually, though, she leaves and barely says goodbye. Lewellen takes this in stride.

Besides, Lewellen has her own preoccupations. She's at that delicate point poised between childhood and adolescence, where she can feel surges of animal vitality and curiosity but doesn't yet understand them (and has no one to explain them to her). With her friend, Buddy (Cody Hanford), who's her own age, Lewellen can feel perfectly innocent offering a kiss in exchange for seeing his "thing", and then go right back to playing as they always have. She doesn't notice the intense stares from the older, pimply-faced kid known as "Wooden's Boy" (Christoph Sanders), when he delivers milk to Grammie's, and she doesn't recognize him as a threat.

Lewellen loves the music of Elvis. She listens to it on the radio, she sings it in her head, and she performs it (especially "Hound Dog") for Daddy, for her friends and for Charles (Afemo Omilami), the groundskeeper for a wealthy local family, who is himself something of an amateur blues singer and takes her to hear some real blues. Of course, the minister at Grammie's church urges (as many preachers did in those days) that rock-and-roll is the devil's music and will inevitably corrupt the town's youth. Grammie is already convinced that youth becomes corrupted at puberty, and she eyes Lewellen suspiciously for telltale signs when she's giving the child a bath.

Besides being a heavy drinker, Daddy is an erratic father, capable of both spontaneous acts of kindness and thoughtless acts of cruelty. His limited abilities as a parent are erased completely when he is the victim of a lightning strike during a thunderstorm. He survives, but the brain damage leaves him with the mental capacity of a child younger than Lewellen. Now Grammie has two youngsters to watch out for, and the lack of an adult man in the house causes a shift in the attitude of local residents toward the entire family.

If all of this is beginning to sound unfocused, then I've accurately conveyed the sensation of watching Hounddog. Kampmeier knew she was making a Southern gothic tale, and she surrounded the innocent Lewellen with a palpable sense of danger almost from the opening frame. With or without the advance publicity, the viewer knows that Something Terrible is coming. But the story keeps meandering off into new subplots, without conveying any sense of where they belong in the overall scheme of things—and I haven't even mentioned the rich little neighbor girl visiting for the summer, who calls herself "Grasshopper" (Isabelle Fuhrman) and enjoys slumming with the poor kids, or Charles's extensive snake-handling activities, which seem to be almost a form of religious worship that he attempts to share with Lewellen (among other things, he "milks" rattlesnakes, creates anti-venom, and collects skins and rattles to ward off evil). Kampmeier leads us through all of these things, giving everything equal apparent weight, before Lewellen is finally lured to a dark place with the promise of a ticket to an Elvis concert and attacked by Wooden's Boy.

It's where things go after the attack that truly exposes the weaknesses in the film's narrative structure. Lewellen predictably tells no one, withdrawing into herself and becoming dangerously ill, but Charles overhears some of the boys talking and learns the truth. Using a combination of folk medicine and a black person's understanding of what it means to be victimized, he brings Lewellen back to herself. Now, this would be hard enough to sell to a contemporary audience on its own, but Kampmeier doesn't stop there. She brings in the equivalent of a deux ex machina by revealing information (and I'm trying to avoid spoilers here) that should have come out much earlier in the story and that, when mixed with elements of Charles's snake "faith", allows Lewellen to close the door on her trauma and leave it behind completely. (In real life, a kid in Lewellen's situation would almost certainly have to go on living in the same town as her rapist.) As the credits rolled, I found myself wondering whether, considering everything I'd seen, Lewellen was jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Hounddog Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Whatever issues one may have with the plot, there are none with the video presentation. Three cinematographers are credited on Hounddog: Ed Lachman (who most recently created the rich period look for the miniseries of Mildred Pierce) designed the film's style and began the project, but had to leave midway through the shoot due to other commitments; Jim Denault; and Stephen Thompson (who was originally the gaffer on the film). But one of the advantages of the digital intermediate process is that it lets the DI colorist compensate for any variations created by such changes in personnel, and the film's image is beautifully consistent, with rich ambers, browns and greens dominating the daytime scenes, and cool blues and deep blacks at night. Hannover House's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced from the DI, and the image is what we've come to expect from such sources: clean, noiseless and detailed, with excellent contrast, solid blacks and vivid colors. There's no indication of high frequency filtering or artificial sharpening, and the film fits comfortably on a BD-25 without artifacts, given the sparse extras.

Hounddog Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As is often the case with the initial Blu-ray releases from new publishers, Hounddog offers identical audio options to what one would find on DVD, namely DD 5.1 and DD 2.0. I haven't yet seen any of Hannover's later releases, but presumably they either already have or shortly will adopt lossless audio as a standard, as have most other issuers of Blu-ray discs, because Blu-ray consumers expect nothing less. Just how much improvement would be obtained from lossless encoding here is debatable, though, because Hounddog's 5.1 mix isn't especially demanding. The surround speakers are used primarily to convey the pervasive sounds of nature (crickets at night, birds and insects by day), and in one creepy dream sequence the surrounds come alive with hissing snakes. Otherwise, they're limited to supporting the spare score by Gisburg (featuring guitarist G.E. Smith), and the mix remains front-centered, with dialogue that's generally clear, if not always entirely communicative.

Hounddog Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Light Out of Darkness: The Making of Hounddog (HD, 1080i; 1.78:1; 11:25): Though relatively short, this featurette is informative about what the filmmakers intended. Interviewees include writer-director Kampmeier, cinematographer Lachman and producers Scott Franklin and Jen Gatien.


• Still Gallery (HD, 1080p; various; 0:52): Some are production stills, some are behind-the-scenes, and some are from the premiere.


• Trailer (HD, 1080p; 1.85:1; 2:06): The trailer tries to make the film seem sweeter and gentler than it is.

Hounddog Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I very much wanted to like Hounddog, because the performances are sincere, the subject matter is powerful and the project was clearly a labor of love. But story must always come first, and if the story is unfocused, a thick coating of atmosphere or slathering of intense acting can't make up the deficiency. This principle is all the more critical when dealing with delicate subject matter. Audiences don't like to be led into rough seas unless there's a sure hand guiding the vessel. The Blu-ray is technically acceptable, but enter at your own risk.