We’ve all poured one out for friends we’ve lost to relationships; a pseudo-funeral rite, mourning the grand times we could — we should — have had. But jealousy or resentment don’t constitute the gesture, rather it’s a sign of respect; an ode to the choices we all have to make.
Conversely, the mere privilege of being afforded even the chance to grasp those options serves as the impetus for Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. A Western psychodrama, this character study bubbles in the volcanic power dynamics brewing in the Burbank family, the bourgeois inheritors of a ranch in Montana. The Burbanks have been blessed with two cowboy brother heirs: the innocuous, lonely George (Jesse Plemons), and Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), a mercurial creature who has cut his teeth with dirt doing manual labor around the farm, like skinning and castrating cattle.
Amplified by the jarring shrill of Johnny Greenwood’s atonal piano, a mass of tension weighs on Cumberbatch’s every inflection. Phil’s a showman that’ll do his utmost to upstage the self-conscious; someone tickled by the assumption that he’s not the alpha in any given environment. His malice is multi-pronged, though, its epicenter the plight of a closeted man. Watching idly as his brother finds love with his newlywed Rose (Kirsten Dunst), seeing the space they have to be publicly affectionate; well that pours a devilish cocktail of contempt — was his brotherhood not enough?
Campion’s austere command over the (in)visible reveals itself in the specter of time as we watch the gradual disintegration of a repressed soul. Through the folds of sunlight and shadow a mountain ridge yields, we see all of Phil, yet, we know nothing. The darkness lies in Cumberbatch’s snarl, under the suffocation of his vacant gaze; yet the sun of his charm persists. His wickedness is a puzzle: the world feels beneath him, his formidable wit surrounded by asinine bozos, something only mollified by well-placed insults.
Adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1968 novel, the subject matter serves as a departure for Campion. Without doubt, her most significant foray into the machinery of masculinity to date, it would be silly to claim it absent from her oeuvre in places like the erotic paranoia of In the Cut, or the possessiveness of The Piano. As such, Campion stifles sex here in its near entirety, only to be acted out through innuendos and glimpses: a stake thrust into the ground; a saddle briefly straddled; the arousing scent of a scarf. For Phil, sexual frustration is present in every breath of his existence, his only outlet the memory of a deceased mentor, Bronco Henry.
The Power of the Dog sweeps us out to sea with its tide of enigmatic motives, leaving us disoriented on Phil’s island of desolation. Its beaches, littered with washed-up vestiges of the past, suggest a complicated history of smothered expression and cyclical vengeance. Where Campion’s approach to “toxic masculinity” succeeds most, though, is in its understanding of its resilient, cancerous nature. Like an insidious wildfire, the effects of Phil’s bitter machinations burn beyond even his purview. The psychological torture he enacts upon Rose and George bleeds into future generations — its gash tragic in the past and present.
