Jane Campion's excellent Power of the Dog has been called a Western by most critics. Although the film is set in Montana featuring cowboys and, even, a cattle-drive, the movie is really a Gothic romance. Power of the Dog is more akin to Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre than Shane or High Noon. The film involves a new bride imported into a remote manor house, a brooding shingle-style chalet filled with trophy heads, weapons, and bizarre rooms -- the two brothers who occupy the home sleep in tiny cots side-by-side in a gloomy upstairs chamber. There is a person who may be insane on the premises and eerie psychosexual currents. The film involves misbegotten romantic obsessions, feuding siblings and there is even a ghost haunting the shadowy manor and outbuildings, a certain Bronco Henry, dead for 21 years when the story begins, but whose presence infuses the remote ranch-house with dread. In conformity with Gothic tradition, the heroine is driven half-crazy with fear and horror. But, in the end, she is avenged.
Power of the Dog is brilliantly acted by its principals who are so vivid that you can, almost, smell them. (The villain, Phil Burbank, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is told to take a bath before attending a soiree that his brother, George, has arranged to celebrate his marriage. Phil not only won't bathe, but attends the party belatedly, boasting of smelling like his horse.) Campion's script is also brilliant, relying on small leit motifs to drive home its points. "The Power of the Dog" is a Biblical citation, a reference to a Psalm that implores God "to deliver (us) from the sword...and from the power of the dog." A range of mountains seems shaped like a barking dog -- although no one can see this but Phil and his protegee, Peter. The beleaguered heroine, Rose, trades hides amassed by Phil so that he can spitefully burn them to some Indians in exchange for beautiful and soft chamois gloves. Peter wears rubber gloves when he hacks apart a diseased animal carcass. Peter, who view himself as the chivalrous defender of his mother, has a kind of iron band buckled over his arm -- this replaces a white towel that he wore over that same arm when working to serve wine in his mother's restaurant. Details correspond and accumulate: references to Bronco Henry become more and more sinister as the film progresses. Phil has a sort of shrine to Bronco Henry in his stable, again a Gothic detail -- Bronco Henry seems to have educated Phil in the arts of cowboying but, also, may have been the boy's lover and tutor in homosexuality. The film revels in hidden places -- Phil has a clearing with a hut where he apparently masturbates; this clearing by the river can only be accessed by crawling through a tunnel of dead wood and roots. Sometimes, Phil takes mud baths on the bank of the river. Objects like Bronco Henry's saddle, with its phallic pommel, are energized by obsession and take on an eerie incandescent significance. (Campion lards the film with all sorts of phallic imagery, almost to the point of absurdity -- at one point, Phil hefts a big fence-post between his legs like a giant erection.) A rope that Phil is braiding from raw hide becomes a central fetish-object in the picture -- a symbol of bondage and, later, a deadly weapon. (In an early scene, we see a similar rope upstairs in a boarding house marked: "For use in Emergency!:) Phil's work braiding the rope has a feminine intensity -- it's a craft like weaving. This type of activity mirrors Pete's handiwork -- he uses a scissors to cut silk roses for the tables in his mother's restaurant. People drink themselves into oblivion and the specter of suicide hangs over the action.
The film begins with a reference to Red River. There's a cattle drive that exposes conflict in a family -- here between the elder brother Phil and his sibling, George whom he derisively calls "Fatso." (George is played by Jesse Plemons, who performs, like every one in the movie, brilliantly). George is phlegmatic, soft-spoken, slow to anger, and not too smart -- although he is gentle and has a kind of courtly grace. (He flunked out of the University where Phil excelled.) At a restaurant, mysteriously plopped down in the middle of nowhere (and an elegant place with white linen table cloths, settings decorated with silk roses, and a wine menu), Phil's band of cow-hands taunt Peter, the waiter. They regard Peter as gay, "little Lord Fauntleroy," someone says about the teenage boy. Rose, Peter's mother, weeps inconsolably about the way her son is treated -- there's some sort of deeper grief in play since she takes the cowboy's mocking more seriously than her son. (He seems to regard the taunts as a mark of honor). George allows Rose to "weep on his shoulder" as Phil later derisively says. Rose, impressed by George's kindness, marries the man,. This enrages Phil who literally beats up his horse since he can't (and doesn't dare) attack Rose. Phil's rage is excessive and can't really be assimilated to what has happened -- Phil says that Rose is a "bitch" who is conniving to destroy the ranch. But his anger may also have something to do with losing his brother to this strange, unhappy woman -- after all, the two men have occupied a single bedroom for, at least, 20 years, notwithstanding the fact that their mansion seems to encompass several dark and gloomy acres of mahogan- paneled walls and chambers. (When George brings Rose to the house, the hoary Gothic motif of the eye peering through the keyhole is invoked -- Phil spies on Rose and George.) George is proud of his new wife. She even teaches him to dance in a visually remarkable scene staged on a barren foothill below equally barren mountains. Campion's most famous film is The Piano and this picture also features a piano, derisively called a "pianino" by Phil. Rose says that she has played piano in the "pit of a cinema" -- that is, accompanied silent films. (The movie is set in 1925). So George imports a big piano for her, but she's a very poor musician -- particularly in contrast with Phil who plays the banjo with great skill and wields the instrument like a rifle. George invites dignitaries to the remote ranch house -- it seems to be about fifty miles from the nearest village by road that crosses over highlands (like the Bronte's moors) spiked with spiny outcroppings of volcanic basalt. These dignitaries include the Governor of Montana (Keith Carradine) and a man called the Old Gent, who may be the stepfather of Phil and George -- family relations are a bit unclear and, I think, intentionally so. At the party, poor Rose is forced to play the piano but the baleful influence of Phil makes this performance impossible for her. She starts drinking heavily and takes to her bed.
Peter, Rose's son by her doctor husband (who committed suicide), is attending medical school. Rose has him spend the summer on the ranch. By this time, she's deteriorated to an incoherent invalid. At first, the cowhands and Phil bully Peter and call him a faggot. This doesn't much bother Peter who seems proud to be queer. He sashays around in unwashed levis, strutting his stuff in front of the leering cowboys. Phil takes an interest in Peter and becomes his mentor. At first, we interpret this change in Phil's feelings as an attempt to procure Peter's silence. Peter has discovered Phil's masturbatorium, that is, his secret place in the woods where the villain hides his homosexual pornography, some of it marked with the name Bronco Henry. But it becomes apparent that Phil has an erotic interest in the overtly gay Peter and may, even, admire him for his courage in presenting himself as proudly queer. Phil teaches Peter to ride and says that the fetishistic rope that he is painstakingly braiding (a parody of "woman's work") will be his gift to the young man. Peter turns out to be vicious in his own right. He catches a wounded jack rabbit in a trap and, then, brings it to his mother as a sort of pet. But, later, we learn that he has killed the rabbit and is dissecting it, ostensibly as part of his anatomy training for medical school. In a later scene, he snaps a rabbit's neck with such blithe indifference that, even, Phil is a little nonplussed. (Phil has called the rabbit a "bugger" before the two men catch it.) Ultimately, the incipient romance between Phil and Peter reaches a sort of morbid climax. Phil dies in a terrible way and we see an undertaker shaving his dead face -- this correlates to the earlier scene, deriving from one of the Brontes' works, involving a dead woman buried who's hair has kept growing post-mortem to fill her entire casket; perhaps, the undertaker doesn't want this to happen to the dead Phil. At the end, Peter reads the Bible passage about imploring God to spare us from the "power of the dog."
Campion's direction is, at once, subtle but unmistakable with respect to the meanings with which she encodes the film's imagery. In a remarkable early scene, we see the cattle herd approaching a town (really just a scatter of buldings on the lone prairie) -- a huge column of dust rises over the distant cattle, suggesting the imminence of doom. This sets-up Western motifs of cowboys shooting up a hapless village in the middle of nowhere -- but nothing comes of this misdirection other than the apocalyptic image of approaching danger with a nod to the destruction of the sexually deviant cities on the plain in Bible. When the cowboys go to the town's brothel, they walk in a bellicose row like gunmen in a Peckinpah movie, but, again, nothing comes of this dire-looking procession. (In fact, another viewer of the film notes that when the obligatory townfolk rush into the building, instead of announcing danger, the fellow says: "Twelve for dinner.") The film was shot in New Zealand and, for the record, none of the landscapes look anything like Montana. The mountains are utterly barren, immense, and deadly looking -- some shots near the end of the movie show the range as a grissaile of barren peaks, hostile and empty of any sort of life, the terrain of death itself. Phil's secret place must be entered by scrambling through a womb-like tunnel of buttress-roots -- the place seems guarded by mangroves. Of course, there are no trees of this sort anywhere in Montana. But the fact that the landscapes are wholly alien is part of Campion's strategy -- these are landscapes intended to reveal the souls of the characters; they are not realistically intended -- rather, they are like the "wuthering heights" in Emily Bronte's novel, a place of utter desolation in which the characters interact against an empty and indifferent nature. Similarly, the characters are highly stylized: Phil is also dressed in white hip-flaring chaps and wears his spurs everywhere he goes. (We find out that Phil is a scholar -- he was number one in his Ivy League class in Greek and Roman; that is, he has studied the homosexual Greek poets and the Latin Catullus). Rose is a pale wraith, completely debilitated as the film progresses. Peter has huge eyes and a ghostly complexion; his face is Kabuki-white with red and black tints in his eye-sockets. Like Phil, Peter is unnaturally rail-thin and, literally, prances around, flaunting his sexuality.
The subject of repressed homosexuality triggering sadism and cruelty was a well-known plot device in the sixties and, even, the seventies. (For instance, this them lurks in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket within the lurid homophobic abuse heaped on the recruits by the sadistic Drill Instructor; these themes in turn flow from D. H. Lawrence's story "The Prussian Sergeant" from 1914 and Melville's handsome sailor, Billy Budd.) But this approach is now passe and, so, most reviews of the movie are coy about its central themes. It is not politically correct that a homosexual such as the self-loathing Phil would not be comfortable in his own skin -- although this is what the movie implies with respect to the villain's mud baths, his refusing to bathe for polite society, and, perhaps, the weird motif of the hides (skins) that he gathers only to burn.(I'm indebted for this insight to another viewer of this film.) In any event, most descriptions of the movie tend to conceal what it is really about. But you should seek out this picture and watch it. This is certainly one of the best movies released in 2021. Most pictures fade in your mind immediately after you have finished watching them -- this picture only expands in its meanings as you think about it.
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