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In films, few lines are as confusing as the one between exploration and exploitation, but whatever else it is and is not, Hounddog, notorious as the Dakota Fanning rape movie, provoking denunciations and even death threats, is not exploitative. Not even close. The film, written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier, unfolds in the fifties in rural Alabama, where the prepubescent Lewellen (Fanning) literally shakes off the oppression of her brutal father (David Morse) and puritanical grandmother (Piper Laurie) by singing Elvis songs and wriggling her body in ecstasy. Fanning has none of the usual child-actor glibness, and her Hound Dog renditions are goofy, unself-conscious and blissful. Motherless, smacked around, Lewellen is an extraordinarily unaffected child in an unsafe world, and when her playmate, Buddy (Cody Hanford), tells her he can get her a ticket to an Elvis concert, she eagerly follows him into a dark barn, where a teenage boy waits in the shadows. The focus of Hounddog is not child-rape, any more than it s Elvis-worship. The movie is essentially an allegory of subjugation and emancipation, of liberation through art. The vision is unsubtle but haunting. Kampmeier draws the South as a lazy but dangerous place. The images are stark, the colors drained (dusty browns, scorched yellows, greens without lushness), the magnolia canopies like Gothic arches. The agent of healing is a black caretaker, Charles (Afemo Omilami), who knows what repression does to the soul; he gets together at night with his elderly musician buddies and sings the blues. The role is dicey. Blacks in inspirational movies often show up to help white folks find their spiritual core, and Kampmeier could have been craftier. She could have given Charles some idiosyncrasies, some unproductive rage anything to make him a person instead of a good angel. But like her heroine, she is guileless which might, in the end, be what saves the movie. Hounddog is not always so black and white. The father, who shoots Lewellen s dog, is struck by lightning and becomes a simpleton, and Morse, a cold actor to whom malevolence comes easily, hits childlike, beseeching notes I ve never heard from him. Lewellen loves him, but there are limits; the wounds he inflicted in his previous incarnation go too deep. Piper Laurie as the grandmother is not kin to her overripe demon in Carrie. At the end of each day, she carefully inspects Lewellen for ticks, as she inspects her soul for evil influences. Fanning is a child actor with a grown-up soul, and every move, every breath, seems mysteriously right. Her Lewellen survives by going in and out of her shell, and when she is out, at play, or bopping and singing, you are torn between elation at her openness and the urge to cry out a warning. That conflict is never fully resolved, which is why this broad, clumsy movie is so wrenching. --New York Magazine
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