The Power of the Dog (2021)
dir. Jane Campion
Rated: R
image: ©2021 Netflix
In The Power of the Dog, New Zealand director Jane Campion has crafted a searing examination of masculinity and the societal expectations that come along with that word, all set against a stunning Western landscape. When, in voiceover narration, a character asks in the opening seconds of the film, “For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? If I did not save her,” he’s asking the central question of the film. What kind of men does our society produce, and why?
Campion’s movie is a deconstructionist western that challenges the genre’s assumptions about manhood and masculinity. Ironically, she does all this with an aesthetic beauty that honors the classical western, akin to the grandiose cinematography of another modern take on the genre, Kevin Costner’s Open Range. On a pure entertainment level, The Power of the Dog is a fascinating character study, dropping a storytelling bomb in its last five minutes that leaves an indelible impression.
Set in 1925, wealthy cattle ranching brothers Phil and George Burbank, with their team of cowhands near the end of a cattle drive, stop in a small town near their Montana ranch. They eat dinner at an inn run by widow Rose Gordon. Her teenaged son Peter helps his mother by waiting tables and doing other chores. Peter aspires to go to college to become a surgeon.
George Burbank is soft-spoken and dresses like he’s on his way to a business meeting, even when out on a cattle drive. Phil, the antithesis of his brother, is a hard charging man’s man who distains bathing and other fineries. To put it bluntly, he’s a cantankerous SOB, but one who commands the respect of his hired hands.
We see the camaraderie that Phil shares with his men when he mocks Peter’s lisp and effeminate manner as the boy serves them dinner. They all laugh as Phil holds one of the roses that Peter has delicately made from cut and folded paper, used as a centerpiece for the table, to a candle, in order to light his cigarette.
George consoles Rose after his brother and employees saunter down to the local whorehouse. He hears her crying because of how Phil has treated her son. George falls for the widow and eventually the two marry. Phil, convinced that Rose is nothing more than a gold digger, is menacing and cruel toward both she and Peter. Initially treating Peter coldly, Phil realizes he can more effectively taunt Rose by taking the boy under his wing.
Campion adapted the screenplay for The Power of the Dog from a 1967 novel of the same name by author Thomas Savage. The director – probably best known for her 1993 breakout film The Piano, starring Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel – has a reputation for exploring, in often uncomfortable ways, gender and power dynamics in human relationships.
The Piano, as an example, is about a woman living in New Zealand’s equivalent of the Old West who must give piano lessons to a man who has come into possession of her beloved instrument. He will trade her a key for each lesson, which includes allowing him to do “things he likes” while she plays for him.
The most fascinating thing about the brutal and uncompromising Phil in The Power of the Dog is that – as we find out about half-way through the picture – the way he presents himself to the world is a façade. I’ll have to dance around spoilers here, but we get a hint of who Phil might truly be when we see and hear his mastery of the banjo. He uses this skill to further torment Rose by mimicking her attempts to practice at a piano that George has bought her as a wedding gift.
George has asked Rose to play during a diner party in which George’s parents and the Montana Governor and his wife will attend. Although Rose apparently played for “hours and hours” as an accompanist in the cinema pit for silent movies, her nerves – and the increasing booze habit that she’s formed to deal with the stress of Phil’s subtle intimidations – make her unable to perform for her guests.
The term “toxic masculinity” is beginning to feel overused, but it’s a perfect descriptor for Phil. He’s adopted this warped version of manhood because it gets him what he wants in the world, respect and power. Campion emphasizes this in the way she and her stunningly gifted cinematographer, Ari Wegner, shoot Phil’s employees. They’re barely supporting characters, and Campion and Wegner go as far as they can in turning them into anonymous figures.
Many of the shots that feature Phil standing with his men use a shallow focus, so that only Phil can be seen clearly. The camera rarely lingers on the cowhands’ individual faces; instead, they are typically shot as a crowd, reverently hanging on every word from Phil.
Phil, in turn, speaks in only reverent tones about the person who taught him how to be a real man. His name was Bronco Henry, and he’s been dead for nearly as long as the Burbank brothers have been running the ranch on their own: 25 years. We never see a flashback of Bronco Henry, not even for so much as a single frame, but the character, the idea of Bronco Henry that Phil lovingly cultivates, looms over The Power of the Dog like a force of nature.
The lessons Phil learned from Bronco Henry about what makes a real man are, as is usually the case, prohibitively rigid and narrow. Neither George – whom Phil constantly refers to as “Fatso,” because he’s stouter than his rail-thin brother – nor Peter fits Phil’s vision of this masculine ideal, and he relentlessly reminds them of it.
It’s instructive here to point out where art and life seemingly intersected for the making of The Power of the Dog. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, according to some media coverage, took a full method approach for the role of Phil. The actor decided to burrow his way into Phil’s toxic mindset; he and Kirsten Dunst, who plays his on-screen nemesis Rose, agreed not to speak to one another on set. Cumberbatch got nicotine poisoning three times during the shoot because of the number of cigarettes he smoked for the role.
The actor also learned to play banjo, as well as reportedly learning how to castrate a bull, which his character does in one scene. The castrating sequence, as well as one scene in which Phil takes his wrath out on a horse, slapping it in the face while charging toward it and spewing misogynistic slurs, has drawn the ire of animal rights group PETA.
I note that The Power of the Dog does not carry the usual verbiage about no animals being harmed during the filming of the movie, so I have to assume that, at the very least, Cumberbatch terrorized a real horse for the movie. It seems odd – and off-putting – that he and Campion would want to recreate a little of the toxic masculinity that they are critiquing with their film.
As I mentioned earlier, cinematographer Ari Wegner captures unimaginably gorgeous vistas for The Power of the Dog. When the budget wouldn’t accommodate shooting in Montana, she and Campion turned their cameras toward New Zealand landscapes that stand in for the American frontier. One image in particular that stands out in my mind is an early one in the film. It’s a shot of the cattle train, with cows stretched from one end of the frame to the other in long shot, towering mountains and soaring open skies above them. Another breathtaking moment comes when the newly married George and Rose share a dance together at a hilltop summit.
Adding to his fine work this year on Spencer, Jonny Greenwood turns in another gorgeously haunting musical score for The Power of the Dog. His orchestrations are much more stripped down here. He primarily uses instruments that might be found on the range: piano, guitar, banjo, with sparing use of strings and brass. The several discordant piano riffs Greenwood includes adds to the constant sense of menace happening on screen.
Some of the symbolism that Campion and the movie employ are a little on the nose. In the latter part of the movie, in which we learn new secrets about who Phil really is, the bully decides to make a whip from rawhide for Peter, after he’s decided to show the boy kindness. Again, in an attempt to avoid spoilers, I’ll dance around the electric climax by only mentioning that the whip becomes a central talisman late in story.
And what is a whip used for, if not control? The kind of twisted masculinity that Phil has built his persona on is also a tool of control. It’s easy to forgive The Power of the Dog a little heavy-handedness when the rest of the film is as rich as it is in character and commentary on the poisoned legacy of masculinity that’s been handed down for hundreds of years.
It would be easy to dismiss what Campion has under her lens here as a relic of a bygone era. But you don’t have to look far – the hyper-masculine violence of the January sixth insurrectionists, for example – to see how much her film is commenting on the here and now.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- Jane Campion’s take on the Western, rife with critiques on gender and power dynamics, is both a rich character study and showcases a psychological battle of wills. The storytelling is propulsive and the aesthetic is simultaneously gorgeous (the natural landscapes) and deeply ugly (the mental landscape of the main character).
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I barely got to the performances in The Power of the Dog. There has been a huge amount of praise for Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil. The performance is good, but I was struggling with his American accent. It sounded like he was forcing it, that he was very conscious of what he was doing. But, considering Phil’s whole life is an act, Cumberbatch’s choice might have been a deliberate one.
- Jesse Plemons shows a quiet strength as George, but the movie sidelines the character about half-way through. That’s understandable as far as the requirements of the story, but I would have been happier seeing more of Plemons, who is always good.
- I’ve been really impressed with Thomasin McKenzie, in particular in Leave No Trace and Jojo Rabbit, but I can’t figure out why she’s in this. Her character, a domestic worker in the Burbank home, is given nothing to do. I have to imagine a lot of her scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.
- Kodi Smit-McPhee is an absolute wonder as the fragile and deeply layered Peter. I first noticed him in the smallish part of Robin Wright’s son in the 2013 head-trip The Congress.
- Kirsten Dunst does a brilliant job of slowly and very quietly falling apart over the course of the movie.
- There’s a quick insert shot – it lasts maybe 3 seconds – that speaks volumes about Phil’s character. In it, he’s using his finger to penetrate the center of one of the paper flowers that I mentioned early in the review. It’s at once incredibly graphic but mundane. It says everything about Phil’s sense of entitlement.
- There’s a similar moment for Peter when we see that he relieves frustration and stress by hula hooping. It’s an odd and almost comedic moment.
- Campion is a big blind spot for me. The Power of the Dog is the only film of hers that I’ve seen. Based on this small sample size, I definitely need to correct this oversight.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- The Power of the Dog is available exclusively on Netflix, which is how I saw it.