Directed by: Jane Campion
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, Kirsten Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee
Rated R, 126 minutes
Jane Campion’s sweeping western epic “The Power of the Dog” defies easy definition. Across its two hours, as scenes of domestic life and ranching in 1920s Montana unfold, the film’s characters approach and repel one another, slowly revealing their greater motivations, but Campion (“The Piano”) rarely addresses these motivations head-on. Instead, the film is full of meaningful looks, quiet antagonism, and wordless scheming; the climax requires the viewer to piece together what has actually transpired, and even then Campion leaves many other questions unanswered.
While its ambiguity and slow pace might make the film less accessible than most, these qualities also make the film a uniquely engrossing drama. Following the ranching brothers George (Jesse Plemons, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”) and Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch, “The Mauritanian”), the film opens with George’s marriage to a widow, Rose (Kirsten Dunst, “Melancholia”), which brings her and her teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee, “ParaNorman”) to live at the family’s ranch house. Over the next several months, the four of them cycle through phases of tension and release: Phil makes no secret of his disdain for Rose, whom he views as a gold digger; Rose develops (and fails to hide) a drinking problem; Peter, rail-thin and effeminate, gets picked on by the ranch hands, though Phil eventually warms up to the boy, teaching him how to ride a horse and braid a rawhide rope.
Carried by an excellent ensemble cast, “The Power of the Dog” is rife with unspoken melancholy, from George’s mild aloofness, to Rose’s hopeless desire to impress, to Peter’s utter disinterest in his bullies and their japes. Their problems aren’t new or even all that interesting by themselves, but the source of their collective tragedy, Campion suggests, is a sort of paralysis, an inability to speak openly to each other. As the film goes on, their words and actions become more inscrutable, their lives more distant.
Undeniably the anchor of the ensemble is Benedict Cumberbatch’s Phil, whose brooding viciousness both keeps the family unified and drives them to despair. A one-time Phi Beta Kappa scholar, the chronically unwashed Phil spends his days hanging around livestock and ranch hands and noodling on his banjo, which he plays absentmindedly in the halls of the Burbank house. Chief among his obsessions is the mentor of his youth, a never-seen figure named Bronco Henry whose memory looms over the film. Soon Phil finds himself taking on a similar mentorship for Peter; a tentative friendship forms between them, even as Phil torments the boy’s mother, mocking her alcoholism whenever she’s sober enough to understand his taunts.
Though his dialogue might be the most direct of any character’s, the subtleties of Cumberbatch’s portrayal reveal a much more complicated man, a sinner in search of deliverance (though not, perhaps, repentance). Never straightforward but always deliberate, Cumberbatch’s performance—his every fiery look, the precision of his every physical movement, even the learned drawl of his American accent—fills in the gaps between the lines of Campion’s script. It’s easily the most commanding performance of his career.
Campion, meanwhile, chooses her close-up moments expertly, focusing on characters’ faces just when their expressions betray them. In several scenes, we watch characters who think they’re alone as they realize someone is approaching; distant, muffled sounds filter through the background eerily, like ghosts. Elsewhere in the film, Campion fixates on the grand landscape of the Montana plains, the stark panoramas of rolling hills and black rocks making George’s tiny Model T, scooting along the country road, look like an ant. If all westerns, to some extent, are ruminations on a landscape so massive it dwarfs all human drama, “The Power of the Dog” keeps this idea close at hand.
On paper, it might seem as though little happens in the movie (even the harrowing conclusion mostly takes place off-screen), but in Campion’s capable hands, it’s a rich and vivid tale, open to many different readings. It’s an exploration of masculinity and homoerotic tension; it’s a slow-burning revenge plot whose elements are Shakespearean in their simple, grave theatricality; it’s an earnest examination of the price of human progress, a tragedy set at the moment when one era gives way to another. Specific and enigmatic in equal measure, “The Power of the Dog” isn’t a reinvention of the western, but a poetic reimagining of it.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 12/17/21.