The Power of the Dog

New Zealand writer/director Jane Campion has long been acclaimed for exploring the inner lives of women through period dramas; bringing a distinctive perspective to gender politics by drawing parallels between historical eras and our own. She is perhaps most well known for her 19th-century-set pictures Bright Star (2008), The Portrait of a Lady (2006), and especially the multi-Oscar winning The Piano (1993), which also won the Palme d'Or, making her the first woman to win the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Now, with The Power of the Dog, Campion returns, after a twelve-year absence from cinema screens, with her first feature to focus on the inner lives of men.

Based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, The Power of the Dog is set in Montana during 1925 and centers on two wealthy ranch owners, brothers Phil and George Burbank, played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons. Phil, tall, lean, and leathery with a thousand-yard stare, is a rough and callus man of the land. George, stocky, fair-haired, with a complexion that looks like he’ll sunburn if he sits too long by an open window, is a clean, kind, but not especially bright soul who lets his older brother’s insults and derision roll off his well-dressed back. The two brothers are as radically different from each other as the two sisters were in Campion’s début feature, Sweetie (1989). But Phil and George are far less convincing or compelling as siblings than those two young women were in the earlier film. Campion makes it clear from the onset of The Power of the Dog that this movie will not be a character study like Sweetie. Instead, it will be another of her heavy-handed works of cinematic poetry like The Piano, where visual metaphor trumps narrative credibility at every turn.

Early in the picture, Phil and George treat their ranch hands to a fried chicken dinner at a local inn run by a widow named Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her effeminate son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil mocks Peter, which entertains his workers but distresses Rose.  George, ashamed of his brother’s behavior but unable to do anything about it in the moment, comes back the next day to apologize. Before long, George and Rose are married, Peter is off to medical school, and Rose moves in with the two brothers, upsetting the balance of power in their masculine household. This juncture should be where the movie really gets going, but it actually grinds to a halt.

The few memorable set pieces that follow—Phil weaponizing his banjo to intimidate Rose when she practices piano; George throwing an awkward dinner party for his parents (Frances Conroy and Peter Carroll) and the governor (a welcome Keith Carradine); Rose trading cowhides to local indigenous merchants, defying Phil's policy of burning the hides he doesn’t need himself—each have a single objective that seems relevant to only one of the four characters at a time. As the picture lingers on, we discover additional layers to Phil as he unexpectedly takes on the role of mentor to Peter, but this focus on Phil comes at the expense of the other three characters, who all, including Peter, grow more one-dimensional with each passing sequence.

Phil Burbank never rises to the level of a great villain nor a memorable protagonist because the psychology of the character is only skin deep. We don’t get a complex exploration of what creates toxic masculinity. We just get a one-note abstraction that may instil fear and fascination in his fellow characters, but it fails to engender either emotion in the viewer. When we casually learn that Phil was once a Phi Beta Kappa classics major at Yale we just have to laugh. How this guy transformed from learned scholar to rugged, unwashed man of the land might have provided some fascinating insight into this individual and men like him. However, the movie isn’t interested in exploring such complexities, just referencing them. This past chapter of Phil’s life does not get revisited but it may help explain why Phil begins to mentor Peter later in the film. We are perhaps meant to infer that Phil was once also a weak, picked-on intellectual, who was groomed by an older, rugged cowboy father-figure. Still, what happened at school and why he embraced toxic masculinity as a kind of religion when he returned to the ranch is left for us to imagine.

The offhanded reference to Phil's classical education may also exits so that we will draw parallels between the protagonists of Greek tragedy and this internally tormented cowboy. Even by Campion standards, that analogue feels pretentious. And it’s all the more disappointing that the psychological backstory that does get explored in the third act is telegraphed to us at every beat of the first two thirds of the picture, so we’re robbed of any sense of discovery by the time of the conclusion. We can guess the unspoken secrets of Phil’s past long before any of the characters do, so when these revelations come about, we’re just left sitting there nodding along going, “right, right, well sure.”

It’s a forgone conclusion that Cumberbatch will score a slew of awards for this performance. It is the most unfussy, non-quirky, least “Cumberbatchian” turn the actor has delivered since becoming a major star. Still, let’s not confuse the fact that he can break from his usual shtick, and has the ability to breathe some credible life into such an underwritten role, with first-rate acting. I also can't help but wonder how much more effective this role and this film might have been had Phil been played by an actor we associate with this type of role—Tom Hardy, Michael Fassbender, or Russell Crowe.

Plemons, the former character-actor of prestige TV shows whose profile has been rising with lead parts in the recent I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Judas and the Black Messiah, is able to arouse our sympathies playing the other one-note Burbank brother. But since the pudgy, put-upon, all-around decent man and good husband George has no narrative arc, there isn’t a whole lot for Plemons to play. The slight Smit-McPhee (The Road, Let Me In, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) is unable to put any meat on the thinly drawn Peter. This shortfall is most unfortunate since Peter ultimately plays a far more definitive role in the story than we might initially think.

Only Kirsten Dunst (Spider-Man, Marie Antoinette, Midnight Special) captures our imagination with a performance that actually makes you believe there is a real human under Campion’s construct. One thing this director has always done well is present female characters who look authentic to their period setting, rather than some glamorized, perfectly groomed impression of women of the era in pristine recreations of garments of the time. Playing slightly older than her 39 years, Dunst’s beautiful but distressed face reads like an inventory of the pain and anxiety Rose has endured over the decades.

In what I hope has just been the first half of her career, Dunst established herself as a cherubic child actor with a wise-beyond-her-years edge in films like Interview with the Vampire (1994), Little Women (1994), and Jumanji (1995), and then made an easy transition to sexy ingénue in films like The Virgin Suicides (1999), Bring It On (2000), and Wimbledon (2004). She grew effortlessly into mature roles in films like Melancholia (2011), The Two Faces of January (2014), and The Beguiled (2017). With this performance, she gives us a preview of the kind of work she’ll be capable of in middle age, and I, for one, can’t wait.

This high praise is not meant to imply that Rose possess any more depth than the menfolk here. She too is a character-type—the vulnerable woman—more than a character. But Dunst is able to play every shade of "the vulnerable woman" without any of her choices feeling cliché. That is until the script has Rose succumb to the bottle in order to smooth out her jagged nerves. This choice reduces the character to one we’ve seen in countless other westerns, and it renders Plemons’s George all the more clueless and inert. I guess we’re meant to loose connection with Rose and George so that we can focus on the relationship that develops between Phil and Peter. I’m not sure why a film of more than two hours can’t maintain interest in all four of its protagonists, nor why each obvious and expected narrative beat must be reached at such a ponderous pace. Ultimately, the tension that builds between the four characters throughout the picture gets released with such instantaneous convenience that it makes me wonder why we were meant to care about it at all. It also implies that destructive men like Phil are easy to deal with—it merely takes intelligence and the ability to channel one of the constructive masculine roles: protector of a vulnerable woman.