The Power of the Dog (2021)
Directed by Jane Campion
A domineering but charismatic rancher wages a war of intimidation on his brother's new wife and her teen son, until long-hidden secrets come to light.
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8 films that influenced The Power of the Dog
What critics say influenced The Power of the Dog
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.
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.
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).
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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.
El personaje de Sterling Hayden en el clásico Johnny Guitar que Campion muy a su modo reimagina era una contradicción insalvable, una paradoja que refutaba el sentido mismo del western.
For those of us who are fans of British filmmaker Edgar Wright—a hometown favorite in my neck of the woods for the Torontopian masterpiece Scott Pilgrim vs. the World —the hope was that Last Night in Soho would reverse the downward trajectory he’s been on since 2017’s enervating Baby Driver.
For those of us who are fans of British filmmaker Edgar Wright—a hometown favorite in my neck of the woods for the Torontopian masterpiece Scott Pilgrim vs. the World —the hope was that Last Night in Soho would reverse the downward trajectory he’s been on since 2017’s enervating Baby Driver.