The Power of “The Power of the Dog”

“When my father passed, I wanted nothing more than my mother's happiness. For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? If I did not save her?”

Jane Campion has added another masterpiece to an inventory of them. In “Power of the Dog”, she delivers a potent, slow-building meditation on masculinity, the transition of eras, and the secrets that lurk inside us. Along the way, both physical and psychological isolation and the failure to connect loom large. 

At the center of the narrative is Phil Burbank, one of a pair of Janus faced ranch-owning brothers, who is the rougher, more brutish of the two. Played by Benedict Cumberbatch, filling out a role that shows his full range of skills as an actor, Phil is a beady-eyed, bullying prick who doesn’t suffer those he considers fools or weak easily. Or at all. 

Phil’s brother George is drifting toward those categories as he retains a civilized veneer, wears nice suits, and manages the business/financial side of the ranch. The distance between the two brothers is established early, as Phil attempts to engage George in discussion about their time together as ranchers and their tutelage under Bronco Henry, both topics that George doesn’t seem terribly interested in. Of course, calling your brother “Fatso” is hardly a sign of deep affection from Phil. It increasingly becomes an invective; especially after George falls for and marries Rose, the owner of a restaurant/hotel in town. 

Jesse Plemons plays George with an astounding sensitivity and the air of a man who, despite years of togetherness with his brother and involvement in ranching is tired of being alone. It’s a startling, quite performance that doesn’t place George as completely at Phil’s service, but shows a man marred by a lack of support and affection, qualities his brother scoffs at and denigrates. Phil doesn’t verbally say as much; he doesn’t need to. It is in how he moves, speaks, lights a cigarette. And plays the banjo.

When Rose comes on the scene and George has announced their marriage and that Rose and her son Peter are moving into the Burbank household, Phil doesn’t hold back his disdain for what he sees as George’s negligence and Rose’s gold-digging. This is literally all Phil can see. His disgust with Peter (Kodit Smit-McPhee, remarkable here as he has been since we first saw him in “The Road” with Viggo Mortensen) is more than evident when Phil, George, and the ranch hands take supper at Rose’s restaurant. 

Rose’s husband had died four years earlier, leaving her alone to run the business. Kodi is on hand to help out, and one could be forgiven for thinking that he is a less than capable young man. Slight of build and effeminate, he is fodder for the mocking of the cattlemen. He had hand-crafted paper flowers for table arrangements, one of which Phil uses to light a cigarette. Nothing in this description conveys the contempt in Phil’s demeanor. Nothing really can without copying and pasting passages from the script, perhaps, but take my word for it that Cumberbatch’s bearing, voice, and glare are the embodiment of a man who despises openly. None of it is categorically complete; even this early on, we sense that there are more dimensions and layers to Phil, as we see unfold over two hours of some of the most expansive interior story-telling I’ve seen.

Kirsten Dunst as Rose Gordonholds the space of a woman doing the best she can in a transitioning world. It makes sense that she and George would find each other as the 1920s catch up to rural Montana. Phil, by contrast, is rooted in the past; he sees himself the last of the last, tutored by Bronco Henry, and revulsed by the changes in the air; from Rose marrying George to the happy patrons dancing to the pianola in the restaurant. He mourns the passing of “real men” when recalling finding a relic from the Lewis and Clark expedition. 

However, there’s even more as we learn that Phil had been a graduate in classics at Yale, with honors at that. George was not so successful a student. We never quite fully understand the reasons why Phil submerged his scholarly past so deeply. We can assume it had much, if not all, to do with Bronco Henry’s influence, which goes beyond teaching Phil how to ride.

His dismissive, ugly attitude toward Rose is clear and played to devastating effect. Rose’s isolation within the house is subtler but also clear. Peter has gone off to medical school and his mother is left to deal with the solitude of running the house, and dealing with Phil’s presence. Before that, though, she and George had some moments of sweetness; she teaching him to dance, he bringing a baby grand for her to play (which mortifies her no end, particularly when he says that his parents and the governor and his wife are coming for dinner and would love to hear her play; no pressure, Rose!)

The dinner party is tense with Rose feeling distinctly out of place and with Phil refusing to wash up to come join the group. Earlier in the day, as Rose was practicing, Phil was upstairs playing his banjo like a weapon. Where her fingering was halting and missing and hitting off notes, his arpeggios came sharp and precise and loudly directed at her playing. She plays chords that he swallows and spits back out. Notes plucked from strings like tiny arrows dipped in poison.

When Rose is called to perform for the group, she simply can’t. Between Phil’s musical belittling and the barely perceptible class divide with Phil’s parents and the governor (an avuncular Keith Carradine), Rose’s isolation descends and flowers like the umbrellas in the glasses of George’s cocktails. One of which she downs in a gulp, thus setting up the next act.

Peter, home from school is almost an immediate target of mockery. However, before he is met by the cat calls, he brings home a rabbit to show Rose as she lies in bed, not even trying to hide a fifth of bourbon. Later, we find Peter dissecting the bunny and we begin to suspect and espy another, darker shade to the young man. 

After a little hazing from the ranch hands, we have Rose cajoling Peter into coming out for a little tennis match. She tells him no more killing of rabbits in the house and two serves later, we discover how far Rose’s drinking has come. As she begs off due to a migraine, Peter asks his mother, “It’s Phil, isn’t it?” She demurs, saying he’s “just a man”; but by now, we know better. There has been no overt gaslighting, or ugliness onscreen; we see it in the result. While Peter and Rose are talking, we see Phil enter the house out of focus over their shoulders. Rose tells Peter to go inside as she goes off to an alley between the house and the barn and vomits. Phil sees her from his room and whistles the tune they had battled with earlier. Rose finds a bottle she had stashed earlier and finishes it off. 

Along the way, we have seen Peter happen along Phil’s bivouac, a tunnel of boughs housing homoerotic magazines that belonged to Bronco Henry and later, Peter’s stumbling upon Phil in the river. Peter heads for the hills as Phil runs after him, but this is just the beginning.

We are led to deeper depths in the following scene. Perhaps it’s the next day, when the Rose, George, and Peter pull up among the resting ranch-hands and after some heckling, Phil calls Peter over and says they got off on the wrong foot. It appears to be an obvious ploy to “woo” Peter away from Rose and this is made clear by reaction shot from Dunst to Cumberbatch. At the same time, one wonders if Peter is genuinely seduced or merely playing along. The overture is so sudden and as wily as Phil is, we later find examples of Peter’s strength and acuity. As it is, the shift in body language from Smit-McPhee to the overtures is striking.

Over the final act, Phil and Peter develop a bond that seems more genuine than anticipated. Is Peter now stringing Phil along or are the two discovering they are more similar than they thought? Phil has taught Peter to ride and has promised to braid him a rope and give it to Phil before his return to medical school.

In a telling sequence, we see Phil and Peter riding off as Rose tells George that she doesn’t want Peter going off with him. The abandonment and loss in Rose’s voice and Dunst’s eyes is piercing, but by now, there is now an established relationship between the two that seems bracketed in something deeper, more complex, and unspoken. 

Phil has already told Peter not to let Rose turn him into a “sissy”, and he’s regaled Peter with tales of Bronco Henry. The subtext piles up, particularly when we consider Phil’s reverie in a glade as he brushes his face and body with a silk scarf with the initials “B.H.” And yet, if Phil has some intimate aim in sight, it’s plain that he doesn’t know how to articulate it. His discomfort with this aspect of his personality falls away in Peter’s presence and it feels as though the manipulation has lessened or transformed into something like genuine caring. Phil has replaced George, at least.

Under a tree, Phil castigates Rose’s drinking and Peter informs Phil that it was he who discovered his father’s body hanging. He dispassionately describes cutting his father down and there is a marked change in Phil’s face (Cumberbatch doesn’t have to do much; it barely registers) but that vanishes when Peter tells Phil that his father said Peter was “too kind” and thought he might be “too strong.” 

A not insignificant sub-plot shows up with a local Native American and his son come to ask after the hides that Phil was using to make the lariat for Peter. Phil had made it known that they were not to be sold or given away and said they would likely be burned. As the man and his son are leaving, Rose gets wind of this and runs after them, telling them that she would be honored if they would take them, knowing (of course) that this would anger Phil. Which it does.

In the meantime, Peter had done some recognizance and skinned a cow that he had found some distance away from the ranch. After Phil expresses his anger at Rose’s action, Peter tells Phil that he had retrieved a hide and worked it because he “wanted to be like [Phil].” Phil is deeply touched and promises to finish the lasso that night.

By this time, as well, Phil had opened a pretty deep wound on his right hand as he and Peter were working away from the ranch. A rabbit had run into a wood pile and while they were lifting pole after pole, the rabbit’s leg was broken. Peter caresses the hare for a bit and you here the “chk” sound of a broken neck. This is another time when Phil eyes Peter with a bit of subtle surprise. It was during the moving of the poles that Phil injured his hand. The wound will become infected.

In short order, or so it feels, Phil is able to finish the lasso but/and takes ill, Rose’s alcoholism renders her bed-ridden and before long, Phil is laid to rest. In a coda of sorts, the doctor tells George that the symptoms of Phil’s death were consonant with anthrax, probably picked up from cattle. However, George points out that Phil was scrupulous about not handling diseased animals. 

The last scene of Peter, hands gloved, holding the lasso Phil made for him, and then sliding it under the bed with his feet, is like a descent into the underworld. 

Let me be clear that there is no meaningful way to convey the depth of impact a film like this has. It is cumulative. It may land, at first, before the end of the film, but it will return, again and again. Image after striking image. Unspoken nuance or laconic dialog after unspoken nuance or laconic dialog. Campion is a master of minimalism. Maybe someone like Assayas comes close (particularly, in something like “Clouds of Sils-Maria”), but she is wholly her own. 

It has been said that this is her first film to examine the men at the heart of narrative and more specifically, the man. However, to do let that be it is to overlook that Rose is as much a part of this as Phil. 

It may be true that in Phil-Rose antagonism, there is the broader dynamic between the more brutal, repressed aspects of masculinity playing off and subjugating the feminine. That the relationship mirrors the oppression of patriarchy is obvious and too easy; however, to not make note of it is to dismiss Rose’s experience here. She is literally driven to drink by one man in her life and the inability to connect with another hierarchy (one no less patriarchal) in the broader class divisions.

If anything, as a critique of the repression within masculinity, “Power of the Dog” points to some ways out, if not exactly to healing the repression that this engenders. Peter’s part in removing Phil as an obstacle to his mother’s happiness and well-being is not quite what I have in mind. The Oedipal nature of the relationship is tragic both for the death of one man, but also for continuing the trauma of the other.

George, more than Peter, strikes me as the possible agent for growing out of the labyrinth of inner loathing and lost paths. In the eyes of his brother, he was a failure and a backslider into softness; however, George is a decent human being, if clueless, and that might be the point. He needs Rose’s eyes and perhaps Peter’s, as well.

Phil’s tragedy, beyond being a victim of an avenging son, is not, of course, waking up to the world as it is becoming, let alone just being kinder and less of a prick. But then, we’d have no film. Phil is no villain and Peter no hero. The pleasure of what Campion is doing here is peeling layer after layer and exploring inner reaches that aren’t really all that hidden. Like Phil’s stash, the truth of the interior is often quite out in the open. 

It is yet another gloriously filmed movie in a season full of them. Ari Wegner is deservedly nominated for her work as DP here. In addition to three establishing shots for Phil, Rose, and Peter, her framing for accentuating George’s sometimes peripheral involvement matches the subtlety of the performances. Little of the action is framed in anything but close shots (the ranch hands at work, the dancing parties in Rose’s restaurant and in the saloon come to mind), but it’s how we see the physical distance between the characters in space echoing their distances between each other. Long shots add to the sense of departure/journeying toward a goal and even as just a shift in the narrative. For instance, Peter receding from Rose (particularly in one scene where he enters the barn to meet Phil, as Phil closes the door behind them) or most obviously, the aerial views of George going to see Rose in their brief courtship, and the sequences from behind obstructions regarding Phil. In one case, we see follow him into the glade as his men bathe and swim in the river. The camera tracking follows Phil through the thicket until he comes to the glade. Or as George is pulling around to take him to the doctor and Phil is staggering with the finished lasso in hand, in a stupor. The tracking there seems to be from inside the house along the table in the kitchen looking out through the windows (or it might be from the barn’s interior?)

The cut to the funeral parlor where George is picking out the coffin and the scene where Phil is being shaved and readied for placement in that coffin is a quiet study in earth tones and blues shadows, replicating leaving this world for the next one. Even Phil’s descending the staircase as he’s dying is a solid composition that does seem to echo works from any of the early modernist painters and the movement between the spaces occupied in sequence by Rose and Phil in their last encounter speaks volumes. 

Even the long shots of the New Zealand-filling-in-for-Montana terrain, the mountains, the rolling hills, and the plains act to reinforce the strangeness of the land and its inhabitants. The Otherness is not in the First Nation but in these strange colonists who don’t even know how to treat each other. 

The cinematography supports the characters, and the soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood definitely amplifies both. In what might be his strongest score since “Let There Be Blood”, Greenwood follows the characters and their arcs with a series of atonal figures and dissonant clusters of strings and woodwinds. It underscores the alienating effects of the repression and antagonism that Phil’s presence sets into motion and that drives the film. The music is just delicate enough to balance out the more strident or tension-filled elements in the script but not so much that anyone is at ease, aside from - perhaps - Phil and Peter at different moments.

It is a stunning work that I’ve watched twice now and I still feel like another viewing is in order. This and “Drive My Car” are my main candidates for the Academy Awards for Best Picture in 2022. Both are examples of measured story-telling, of loss, of pain, separation, and possibilities beyond the effects of the traumas that infect us.

Gallery:

In lieu of the shots that I had in mind, I did find the following. Each of these speak to Wegner’s approach to composition and the space within which the characters exist.

Be sure to click (or double-click) on each image to see them larger and in a slide show.