Jane Campion
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The Searchers (1956)
Directed by John Ford
influenced The Power of the Dog (2021)
Visuals Characters
Here, imagery eroticizing cowboy iconography mixes with tributes to the great masters of Westerns past: Campion returns again and again to the image of Phil, sometimes with Peter by his side, silhouetted against the doorway of a barn à la John Wayne in The Searchers .
The legendary director constructs a film that is filled with visual queues that harken back to westerns of the past, including John Ford’s The Searchers , while having its own distinctive voice.
Brutalised by his own brutality, Phil is moulded from the same Cain-like clay as the hoodlum (Lee Marvin) who loathes his moll and stubs a cigarette on a barfly’s hand in The Big Heat (1953); Ethan Edward (John Wayne), who covets his sister-in-law and would murder his niece in The Searchers (1956); and the 18th century master-of-arms (Robert Ryan) so disturbed by the beauty of a young sailor (Terence Stamp) that he must destroy him in Billy Budd (1962).
The iconic doorway shot in The Searchers is retooled here as a motif that Campion continually uses to box characters in, despite their expansive surroundings.
The film’s plot recalls “Brokeback Mountain” with only one gay cowboy, and indeed a 2001 edition of the Savage novel has an afterword by “Brokeback” author Annie Proulx.
No matter: The action unfolds on a booming Montana cattle ranch circa 1925, a quarter-century since the kindly George Burbank (Jesse Plemons) and his viperous older brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) started working the business their parents gave them — they exude what “Brokeback Mountain” author Annie Proulx referred to as “quiet wealth” in the afterward she wrote for the republication of Savage’s novel.
It starts like an old Howard Hawks western but, as it deals with repression and yearning, edges ever closer to the world of Campion’s earlier, New Zealand-set period piece, The Piano, or even of Brokeback Mountain .
While the western tone and subject matter has drawn comparisons to "Brokeback Mountain," the story feels distinctive, and owes as much to Campion's signature movie "The Piano" with its strained relationships in a harsh, remote environment.
Days of Heaven (1978)
Directed by Terrence Malick
influenced The Power of the Dog (2021)
Visuals Themes
The time and place are superbly evoked in Grant Major’s production design, dominated by a cattle ranch homestead reminiscent of the Sam Shepard character’s in Days of Heaven , only darker and more oppressively Gothic with its heavy oak interiors, surrounded by grassy plains and backed by mountains.
On its face, the haunting Western concerns Phil and George, radically disparate brothers living on a ranch that aesthetically feels indebted to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven , and the ways Rose comes between them.
Reaching back to a Hollywood tradition built on films like “East of Eden,” and also to Terrence Malick’s rural art-house parable “Days of Heaven,” Campion, who wrote the script (based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel), centers the tale on two adult brothers who have spent enough of their lives intertwined to know just how different they are.
Ari Wegner’s work is immaculate, filming the country similar to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven , where the world can look gorgeous in a variety of lights, but within the text is the complexity of people.
One thing is certain, that The Power Of The Dog is the most gorgeous-looking Western set in the early 20th century since Days Of Heaven 43 years ago.
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Directed by Charles Laughton
influenced The Power of the Dog (2021)
Music Themes
And then there is his voice: guttural, growling, at times reminiscent of John Wayne and at others—especially when he softly whistles that piano tune to further torment Rose—recalling the menacing purr of Robert Mitchum as the false preacher in The Night of the Hunter.
Arguably an ensemble piece, especially considering the quartet of principles are each shouldering significant secrets which lends them an insular, cold aesthetic, it’s a poetic, sexually charged odyssey of menace in the vein of Faulkner and Laughton’s classic The Night of the Hunter (1955).
Pride and Prejudice (1940)
Directed by Robert Z. Leonard
influenced Bright Star (2009)
Themes Characters
In what I believe is director Jane Campion's answer to "Pride and Prejudice," the act breakdown reveals two currents flowing through this intense love story that involves poet John Keats who, though published and penniless, was posthumously destined to take his place alongside Lord Byron and Shelley as the key contributors of the Romantic movement in 19th century English literature.
She's not a quick-tongued wit, like Pride and Prejudice 's Elizabeth Bennet.
And as a result, this well-acted, smart drama is sure to appeal to fans of classy literate period dramas, such as the Merchant-Ivory productions, or the Oscar-nominated adaptations of Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice."
A director can generate non-explicit sexual attraction in a period piece: Watch Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice, and tell me Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet don't long to rip off one another's pantaloons.
It has some of the same emotional power and enchantment as the 2005 movie version of Pride and Prejudice .
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced The Power of the Dog (2021)
Themes Characters
Some have compared this to There Will Be Blood , and it’s a very different film, but it’s a decent starting point for understanding the vibe.
The mounting dread embedded in the narrative and enhanced by the increasingly agitated strings of Jonny Greenwood’s atmospheric score — which is right up there with the Radiohead musician’s powerful work on There Will Be Blood — seems to have set the story on an inevitable trajectory toward sorrow.
An unhappy marriage is also at the center of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog , which earned its director a prize in Venice and also features a score by Greenwood—this one more than a bit reminiscent of his atonal accompaniment for There Will Be Blood.
He’s kin to another protagonist of a latter-day western, Daniel Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview, in “There Will Be Blood” (2007).
The Power of the Dog sometimes feels like Campion’s female-centric reply to There Will Be Blood .
When George does decide to wed the weeping widow and bring her into the estate, Phil’s even darker, crueler instincts float to the surface, and do not sit well with either the fragile, teetering Rose, or with her even frailer son, setting up a potentially vicious beat down to rival the last great movie Western, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
Jane Eyre (2011)
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
influenced by The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Bright Star (2009)
Visuals
If this Jane Eyre, in the wake of at least 20 earlier movie versions, doesn't fully sustain this spirit of reinventing the Brontë story (it can't match the boldness with which Jane Campion recalibrated The Portrait of a Lady for the 1990s), there are sufficient rewards to engage a viewer who hasn't encountered this quintessential Victorian, death-steeped romance since sophomore English, principally the two leads and their duet of Byronic morbidity and virginal fluster.
Fukunaga’s “Jane Eyre’’ is both wilder and more muted, and in tone and pacing it most closely resembles 2009’s “Bright Star.’’
The cinematography by Adriano Goldman recalls the look of Jane Campion's Bright Star, another literary love story that incorporated nature not just as a pretty backdrop but as a thematic element; here, the lead couple's volatile relationship seems inextricably tied to the changing landscape around them.
(The last similar movie I can recall was Jane Campion's 1990 biopic An Angel at My Table.)
Meanwhile, Harvey Keitel ("The Grey Zone," "U-571") shows up as another FBI agent, Mary-Louise Parker ("The Portrait of a Lady," "Fried Green Tomatoes") plays Norton's wife, Philip Seymour Hoffman ("Almost Famous," "State and Main") embodies a seedy journalist and Anthony Heald ("Proof of Life," "8MM") reprises his role from "Lambs."
His discovery of it it echoes the experience of Meg Ryan’s Frannie in Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003), a gruesome feminist thriller set in post-9/11 New York that is analogous to You Were Never Really Here in its mood of creeping dread.
The film comes to feel like a woman's rewriting of Last Tango in Paris , with Winslet fearlessly plumbing emotional depths surprising for an actress so young.
We get a sexual power play that's close to the heart of Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) by visual way of Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970).
There's an analogue in tales of Amazons cutting off their breast to better facilitate the drawing of a bow--your reminder that this is the original ending to the book that would become Jane Campion's brutal/beautiful In the Cut .
The entire camera work by Stuart Dryburgh, most notable for his work on Jane Campion’s “The Piano” twenty years ago, is smoothly appealing with stunning shots for the audience to sink their teeth into.
This “Mitty” is visually resplendent with some of the best work of cameraman Stuart Dryburgh’s (“The Piano”) career amid eye-catching landscapes.
Bright colors prevail: cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh (“The Piano,” “Lone Star”) seems to be auditioning to shoot the next generation of videos for songs by sigur rós.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Directed by Céline Sciamma
influenced by The Piano (1993), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Bright Star (2009)
Themes Visuals
The comparison with Jane Campion’s Palme D’or winner, The Piano , is an obvious one to make, but when the credits roll 120 minutes later it is obvious that Sciamma’s picture stands tall on its own merit.
Not since Jane Campion’s The Piano has a costume drama presented such a gorgeous view of love from a woman’s point of view, as in Portrait of a Lady on Fire .
With nothing to do with Henry James’ The Portrait Of A Lady (just in case you were wondering), this offers a beautifully quiet and poised performance from Merlant, although Haenel at times seems to think she’s in Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad , and therefore stands around expressionlessly and offering really… really… long… pauses in between her line-readings.
Indeed, Sciamma has crafted one of the best filmic love stories of the 21st century; it joins romantic masterpieces like In the Mood for Love , Before Sunset , Bright Star , and Carol in its capacity to give us a picture of authentic erotic love without ever devolving into the lewd or obscene.
…the bar for erotic BDSM thrillers is notoriously low (9½ Weeks and Fifty Shades of Grey have betrayed kink again and again) even with certain exceptions (the stellar Bound, Jane Campion’s In the Cut)––simply knowing your stuff doesn’t get you far.
Eat Pray Love (2010)
Directed by Ryan Murphy
influenced by The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke (1999)
Themes
But if you hanker after distaff questers who are truly hot for God or wisdom or something that passes for transformative experience, buy a ticket to travel instead with Adela Quested ( Judy Davis ) in " A Passage to India " ... or Kate Winslet 's "goddess" in " Holy Smoke " ... or Nicole Kidman 's dreamer in " The Portrait of a Lady " ... or Patricia Arquette 's Red Cross Knight in the mythic " Beyond Rangoon ."
But if you hanker after distaff questers who are truly hot for God or wisdom or something that passes for transformative experience, buy a ticket to travel instead with Adela Quested ( Judy Davis ) in " A Passage to India " ... or Kate Winslet 's "goddess" in " Holy Smoke " ... or Nicole Kidman 's dreamer in " The Portrait of a Lady " ... or Patricia Arquette 's Red Cross Knight in the mythic " Beyond Rangoon ."
It's a topic that's been handled in films before, perhaps most notably in Jane Campion's "Holy Smoke," but Durkin offers the most persuasively believable peek into the psyche of such a character I've ever seen.
There is a foglike dread, dread of how bad things can get, that runs through violent female-made films like Jane Campion’s In the Cut and Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin — a subtle undertone of the silent agony that male supremacy is built on.
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (2021)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by The Piano (1993)
Anyone who appreciates the work of writer/director Jane Campion — particularly her Oscar-winning 1993 drama The Piano — knows you’ve simply got to let her take the wheel and drive.
McKenzie, who is from New Zealand, gives as rich and confident a performance as her compatriot Anna Paquin in The Piano .