Ever since she burst onto the cinematic scene with The Piano in 1993, Jane Campion has dealt with toxic males and their negative effect on women, though usually with the women finding ways to overcome that toxicity. Ada, the silent mail-order wife in The Piano, may be brutally maimed by her husband before being cast aside, but she still finds a way to rise from those depths. The betrayed protagonist in The Portrait of a Lady manages to extricate herself from those who betrayed her. In the fierce pas de deux, Holy Smoke, a deprogrammer tries to break a young woman whose family believes she’s been caught up in a cult, only to have the woman turn the tables of the deprogrammer. While she’s only done a handful of movies, usually serving as both director and screenwriter, they are all sharply honed and memorable. The break between her last film, Bright Star, and her latest film was 12 long years, though several of those years were taken up producing the powerful mystery series Top of the Lake, filmed in her native New Zealand.
Now Campion is back with The Power of the Dog. Sometimes when there’s a long layoff, the movie delivered may be a pale copy of previous work. Instead, Campion has made the most powerful film of her career, attested to by its receiving 12 Oscar nominations, the most of any film of 2021. She’s also taken aim at a much larger target – the American West mythos of masculinity – and has hit that target dead center.
Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) runs a large ranch in Montana with the help of his brother George (Jessie Plemons). It’s 1925, and George is as likely to travel by Model T Ford as by saddling up a horse. Phil, though, embraces the ethos of the West with a virulence and volatility that overwhelms all in his sphere. Quiet and honorable George is often the target of Phil’s barbs, though from long experience he sloughs them off. While on a stop-off during a cattle drive, George meets Rose Gordon (Kristen Dunst), who runs an inn. Rose is the widow of a doctor who’d committed suicide, and she’s helped at the inn by her son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is also studying to become a doctor himself. Peter is a quiet, self-contained young man who appears to be too delicate for the world in which he moves. One of the first things we see him do is create beautiful paper flowers to decorate the inn’s dining tables. Phil uses one to light a cigarette.
George marries Rose and moves her back to the ranch, while Peter is able to attend college to pursue his studies, thanks to George’s money. Phil treats Rose like a foreigner invading his territory, brutally demeaning her in multiple ways. Yet we learn there’s more to Phil, who’d had a classical education back east before he dove fully into his western persona. Phil’s constant belittling leads Rose to drown her feelings in whiskey. When Peter comes to spend the summer at the ranch, Phil finds the perfect way to destroy Rose – take her son away from her and change Peter into a version of himself.
The Power of the Dog is a film that seethes with the intensity of the characters, with underlying tension in every scene. It is a revelatory performance by Cumberbatch, winding through scenes like a rattlesnake ready to strike. Yet Campion also peels back Phil’s exterior, revealing a sensitivity that’s been almost crushed by his choice of personality. Plemons effectively plays the other Western stereotype, the strong, silent type, though he can’t protect Rose as Phil grinds away at her soul. The role gives Dunst a chance to shine in a way she couldn’t for years. (Interestingly, Plemons and Dunst have been in a long-term relationship in real life.) Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Peter is the epitome of the old phrase, “Still waters run deep.” While Phil and the ranch hands laugh at Peter as he walks around in stiff new jeans and a pristine western hat, he has no trouble gently capturing a rabbit, then dissecting it for practice. Smit-McPhee had begun as a child actor, though in roles you wouldn’t expect such as walking The Road with Viggo Mortensen or befriending a child vampire in Let Me In. He continued to work throughout his teens and early twenties, including playing Nightcrawler in the most recent X-Men films. With The Power of the Dog, he’s staked his claim to being a powerful adult actor in the vein of Christian Bale and his costar Cumberbatch.
The title is taken from a Bible verse, Psalms 22:20 in the King James Version: Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog. It’s an open question, though, right up to a devastating final twist, who needs to be saved from the power of the dog. Campion has crafted a harsh, rough film that at first seems to grab you by the throat. But you’ll find that it keeps hold of your soul long after the credits have rolled.
omnivorous cinephile 