“The Power of the Dog” - Film Review
The Power of the Dog is a movie best seen knowing as little about it as possible. In an effort to preserve the viewing experience for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, this review will be perhaps a little more vague than usual.
All I knew going in was that this was supposed to be a Western and director Jane Campion’s triumphant return to movies after a twelve-year gap. On the surface, The Power of the Dog is both of those things. In fact, Campion lulls you into expecting a harsh Western and nothing more.
The film centers on two brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George Burbank (Jesse Plemmons) in 1925 Montana. They’re wealthy ranchers who are polar opposites. Where Phil is brutal and ruthless, George is kind and quiet. Their relationship splinters when George marries Rose, a widow (Kirsten Dunst). Campion makes you believe that this is where the meat of the movie will be, in this fractured brotherly relationship, and for a while it is. It’s a fascinating look at two versions of masculinity at odds with each other in a world that could be considered the peak of masculinity. I couldn’t help but think of Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow and Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete, two lovely movies grappling with the same concept of masculinity in the harshness of the American West.
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Rose has a son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who’s immediately bullied by Phil and his cowhands. The audience first meets Peter as he’s carefully creating beautiful flowers made of paper. He wants to make something for his father’s grave that would last a little longer than real flowers. Before she married George, Rose ran a small restaurant and Peter acted as the waitstaff. George, Phil, and their cowhands stop there for dinner on a long haul and this is where they all meet for the first time. Upon seeing Peter, Phil makes snide comments and uses one of Peter’s paper flowers to light his cigarette. The animosity only grows from there.
That’s where the movie begins, but so far from where it ends. It twists itself from that tense Western to a rumination on sexuality and then to a simmering revenge story. Campion uncoils each of the threads of the movie so meticulously that when it ends and the shoe drops, you realize the opening lines laid it all out for you. It’s a masterclass in the thin, thin line between the action and inaction of desire; how denial is a powerful, blinding, sometimes all-consuming drug. And the things we do to the people we love and the lengths we will go to in order to protect them.
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With stunning views of the West (New Zealand standing in for Montana), Campion shows how isolated all of these characters are. Gorgeous mountains and the sheer emptiness of the “wild” West show that their loneliness is compounded by nature. That loneliness is what each of the characters is trying to overcome. Phil longs for his mentor who passed away, Bronco Henry. Rose and Peter are reliant on one another, suffering when they are apart. George breaks down crying at a picnic with Rose when she teaches him to dance. He says, “I just wanted to say how nice it is to not be alone.”
There is a sense of dread that begins from the very first notes plucked on the guitar. The composer, Jonny Greenwood, has provided unnerving soundtracks for many Paul Thomas Anderson movies and two Lynne Ramsey movies. There’s a very real possibility that Greenwood will get three Best Original Score nominations with The Power of the Dog, Spencer, and Licorice Pizza, all in the running for the 2022 Oscars.
The interesting thing about the dread that envelops the audience from the very beginning is that what we are afraid of throughout the course of the movie morphs into many different people and things. The constant is dread itself. But how that dread manifests itself, in characters vying for control, is ever-changing. Figuring out what each character wants to control and how they go about controlling it (or failing to control it) is a fascinating journey.
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Despite all the praises sung, there are a few missteps. Cumberbatch is ever so slightly miscast as the brutal Phil. Some of his unbridled aggression felt a bit forced. Phil represents a sort of stoicism that Cumberbatch just did not embody fully, but a scene late in the film where he’s lying in the field is a gorgeous use of his talents. Dunst is woefully underutilized, too. Her nuanced portrayal of Rose deserved more screen time, and it’s a shame we were deprived of that. The more time she and Peter spend around Phil’s hostility, the more she relies on alcohol, but the movie’s focus shifts from Rose at this time. Sadly, for the movie to unravel the way it does, there was not a way to fully flesh out her character’s alcoholism. A disservice to both the character and Dunst’s portrayal.
When The Power of the Dog ends, there is an immense desire to immediately start it from the beginning to see the puzzle pieces that were laid out for the audience. To appreciate the movie in a new way, from a bird’s-eye view, knowing how it ends. To create a movie that begs for an immediate rewatch like that is no small feat. Welcome back, Jane Campion.
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