Hounddog

Details

Hounddog
Directed by Deborah Kampmeier
Empire Film Group
Opens September 19

Related Content

• Blogroll Gazette: Wedding Food and Creme Brulee Donuts
  May 18, 2012
• Homeless Youth Run in New York City Half Marathon
  March 20, 2012
• GRACELAND ODDITY
  January 11, 2012
• Three Oscar Winners, An Ex Porn Goddess, And Elvis's Costar Who Became A Nun!
  November 2, 2011
• Dumbass Bachmann Wishes Elvis A Happy Birthday On His Death's Anniversary
  August 16, 2011

More About

• Dakota Fanning
• Deborah Kampmeier
• Robin Wright Penn
• Movie Stars
• Celebrity News

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Having lurched through a gantlet of Sundance jeers, recuts, and release delays, writer/director Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog—at least as far as the press notes indicate (urgently)—now exists as a version different from the one that met such derision. One imagines, however, that the song—both the hip-swiveler of the title and the Southern Gothic story of FUBAR families, innocence, and, yes, child rape that it brackets—remains more or less the same. Dakota Fanning plays 12-year-old Lewellen, and while the role will test the patience of even the staunchest survival-parable lovers, Fanning's extraordinary poise finally trumps precocity. "I'm gonna kill my daddy one day," she declares in the first scene, and why not? Played by David Morse, he's an inconstant brute with a wardrobe full of wife-beaters, in case there was any doubt. The symbolism is as clobbering as the blows that send Lewellen's maybe-mommy (Robin Wright Penn) reeling: Snakes abound, notably in a grotesque, crotch-slithering dream sequence. Shot in mellow green and gold, Hounddog manages an engaging summer sweetness in its early scenes, as Lewellen plots to obtain a ticket to a local Elvis concert, but in the wake of the inadvertent betrayal that leads to her now-notorious rape (a sequence that, ironically, seems to have lost the horrific impact it needs), the film turns listless. By the time Lewellen gets tutored in the white-girl blues by a band of magical Negroes, it has fulfilled its risible potential.