The year’s best film is a western, based on a novel from the 1960s (by Thomas Savage) when the western was a more accepted popular genre in both movies and books than it is now. But it modifies that genre, creating something more elusive and unmanageable: western psychodrama? Western gothic? And it tackles issues around sexual politics, toxic masculinity and family dysfunction in a very contemporary way.
The Power of the Dog is Jane Campion’s first feature film in over a decade, the last 10 years having been mostly taken up with her hit streaming-TV series, Top of the Lake, with Elisabeth Moss. Maybe that project influenced the element of murder mystery in this latest film, whose title is taken from Psalms 22:20: “Deliver my soul from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dog!”
Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons play two brothers, Phil and George, who run a cattle ranch in 1920s Montana. Phil is a sweaty roughneck: an instinctive and vicious bully who calls his brother “fatso”, encourages the ranch-hands to mock him and jeers at George’s pretensions to fancy clothes and hats. In his self-important and self-congratulatory way, Phil is obsessed with the fact he is the one with the hands-on practical know-how to make the ranch work, unlike his milksop brother, because he learned these skills from a veteran rancher, now dead, called Bronco Henry. But Phil is also repressed and utterly reliant on George emotionally: these two grown men share a bedroom in their large house like little kids.
But which of these two is putting on airs? Who is putting on the act? The two brothers come from money: their rich, sophisticated and politically well-connected parents staked them in the business. There is an excruciating scene when the elderly couple come for dinner: George insists on dressing up in a tux. But Phil embarrasses everyone by showing up sweaty and dirty.
The existing tensions between the brothers explode into the open when George reveals to Phil that he has got married, to Rose (Kirsten Dunst) the widow who runs the cafe in town and has a sensitive teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), now to be George’s stepson and heir. Rose is going to move in as the mistress of the house and Phil senses the immediate loss in his own status: he subjects Rose to a hateful campaign of harassment and makes Peter the subject of homophobic bullying. But then, a strange turnaround takes place: he makes friends with young Peter and declares he will take him riding in the remote hills where he will school him in the ways of ranching and being a man – the way Bronco Henry schooled him.
Cumberbatch makes Phil a vivid and horrible monster, all the more disquieting for his flashes of intelligence and cunning. When Rose brings her piano into the big house (an irresistible echo of the earlier Campion classic) and attempts to play Strauss’s Radetzky March on it, Phil mischievously joins in on his five-string banjo, putting poor Rose off her stroke and revealing that he is, in fact, rather more musically talented than she is. But Kodi Smit-McPhee’s performance as Peter matches him in presence and potency, and the story doesn’t at all go where you think. It is a movie with lethal bite.
