There are many indelible moments sprinkled across the 128 minutes of The Power of the Dog, writer-director Jane Campion’s first feature film in the twelve long years since 2009’s Bright Star (which was itself her first film in the six long years since 2003’s In the Cut, so if I am doing the math right, we should all eagerly be ready for the next one in 2045); moments that feel like they are both the summary of the whole entire film is always doing, and at the same time so precise and perfect in themselves that they don’t seem to be expressing any other thing beyond the exact stakes of that singular narrative moment in all their psychological depths. It is, maybe, a film made almost entirely out of those moments. So there’s no sense in which the moment that has stuck with me the hardest is more special or telling than anything else. It’s just that, like much of the film, it’s basically perfect: George Burbank (Jesse Plemons), a wealthy ranch owner who hasn’t shaken off the crustiness of East Coast society despite 25 years or more in Montana, is enjoying a walk in the open wilderness with the widow Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst). He attempts to express his feelings of love and gratitude towards her, and trails off, turning his back to the camera, rubbing his his nose with his hand. She walks around, with her back to the camera as well and they stare off in different directions at the landscape, before she turns to him and manages, in doing so, to at least pull him back into profile relative to the camera. He might not quite be able to face us and let his emotions be known, but he’s at least aware that he needs to try.
Of all the moments I could touch on, I lead with this one for two reasons. First, because, I mean holy shit, blocking in a movie, and moreover blocking that uses the three-part relationship between camera, actor, and set to tell the viewer what’s going on psychologically in the moment above and beyond what the script or even the acting are doing? I mean, golly, it’s almost like films are better when they’re made by great filmmakers who care about what they’re doing. Just seeing somebody like Campion, whose entire career has been about finding subtle ways to tease out what isn’t being expressed, what is maybe not even expressible, come along and being, like “alright, see, this is how you stage this, there’s nothing fancy to it…”, it gives a body hope for the future of cinema.
Second, because for all that I just said that no one moment could actually some up all of The Power of the Dog, this isn’t a bad attempt at it. The film, adapted by Campion from a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, focuses on people who cannot communicate what’s going on inside their minds, and the pain it causes themselves and each other as a result; George’s old-fashioned primness that leaves him a bit stuffy and addled about such matters is perhaps even the most benign example of this, one that causes suffering only because of an absence, not as a presence. And it’s such a clean, simple, graceful way of visually staging that! But the film is full of great examples of staging that shows how people are feeling things they can’t or won’t articulate, perhaps not even in the absolute privacy of their own souls. That’s something Campion has always been very good about, after all, the subterranean currents between and within difficult people, the gaps in understanding between who we think we are and who we present ourselves as being and who we really, actually are underneath the self-preservation of ego. The Power of the Dog, with its neo-Western trappings – it takes place in 1925, here all presented as a moment when the Old West has been gone a full two generations, but the lingering aura of it clings like a stubborn stench – and its focus on, if I am not mistaken, the first male protagonist in the director’s filmography, might superficially not seem like the most natural fit for Campion’s established interests, yet its depiction of the wearying, hostile tensions between people burying their private pain couldn’t possibly be a better match for her talents.
What’s slightly disappointing about this, if I am being honest, is that it feels very “yielding”, for want of a better term; “obvious” feels more judgmental than I want to be. Right hand-in-hand with characters who keep disguising and distorting themselves, Campion’s films have always built themselves around opaque, ambiguous narrative questions: why is Ada mute in The Piano? What literally the fuck at all about The Portrait of a Lady? They are brick walls to bash one’s head against, not tidy little character studies, and if it is perhaps a lot to call The Power of the Dog a “tidy” character study, its mysteries are not hiding very deep. This is something of a great disappointment right after the midway point, in the film’s part “IV” (it divides itself into five chapters, of which the fifth is by some distance the longest): here’s where we get the two biggest character pivots, and they’re both kind of crummy, one because it is briefly let down by some over the top acting, the other because it is a hackneyed twist (that would have been less hackneyed in 1967, but I’m not reviewing the novel) and feels lazy. And the latter, in particular, just basically “solves” the whole movie for us, and it never does anything in its remaining hour to “unsolve” itself. I never felt like I had to fight The Power of the Dog to learn its secrets, it basically just told me what it was on about, and that’s a letdown coming from a director whose movies have, one and all, always forced me to question not just what they were giving me but my own perception of what I was being given. Jane Campion films excite me because they feel like interrogations of the viewer. The Power of the Dog is just a terrific character story.
But let’s emphasise the right part there: it is a terrific character story, and here I haven’t even mentioned the two most important characters. So in 1925, the Burbank brothers own a ranch, and have quite a tidy sum of wealth from it: I have mentioned old-fashioned gentlemen George, but he’s barely a personality at all in the face of his big brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), who has so fully enmeshed himself into the scruffy life of a Wild West cowboy that it’s probably accurate to call him a feral animal. Certainly, he acts like one: he’s a haughty, insulting, nakedly cruel fucker, devoid of even the charm that lets some people get away with acting like bullies and somehow remaining sympathetic to their victims. His jokes are humorless, his affect flat – I have more than my share of reservations about Cumberbatch’s acting in general, especially when he’s playing an American (the accent seems to give him a huge amount of trouble), but The Power of the Dog repurposes all of his limitations as strengths, with even his nasal voice coming across as a sign of the characters pissy irritability. He’s so good at putting across the chilly superiority and venomous arrogance of Phil in his element that it’s honestly a bit sad when the script gives him room the start layering in nuance; the nuance is appreciated and worked in smoothly, but at the same time, the shark-toothed cruelty and the nasty, judgmental indifference he’s wielding earlier on is just so good, the film can help but lose some of its primordial power when he becomes more of a recognisable human.
The Burbanks and their team happen upon a restaurant run by the widow Rose, and her gangly son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a pale, scrawny, effeminate figure who becomes an immediate target for the pettiest of Phil’s insults; this plus his general meanness is enough to put Rose into a state of something akin to shock every time they interact. And this proves to be a good deal, given that George, attempting to apologise for his brother, ends up courting Rose, and they soon marry. And that sets up a film’s worth of inter-character tensions, all centered on the maleveolent force of nature that is Phil: George tries to be refined and mature, and keeps bottling himself up in tight little ways, Rose is constantly tense and miserable and turns to drink (Dunst playing drunk is such a considerable step down from the emaciated wariness of Dunst in every other mode here that I’m a little confused how a director obviously watching her cast so closely could let it happen), and poor Peter is the target of some very unpleasant direct attention, as Phil decides, in what his horrible mind probably thinks is a form of kindness, that the best way to help the boy grow up is to browbeat him into peforming the rites of Western masculinity.
It’s all very nervy and heavy, made far more so by an exceptional good application of beautiful craftsmanship, though I think there’s little doubt that after Campion herself, the most important people here are cinematographer Ari Wegner and composer Jonny Greenwood. The latter provides The Power of the Dog with a set of jarring, anachronistically modern cues, mostly for brass (I think), spiraling in repetitive, tonally harsh waves that feel like the movie is trying to strangle us with sound. Not just the music, either: in one of the film’s best scenes, Rose becomes dimly aware of Phil playing banjo along with her piano, the strums of his strings feeling like a hollow, thudding echo of her own notes, like a shadow crawling along below her.
Wegner, for her part, works with Campion to create some of the first images of the 2020s that I would without hesitation feel like real, honest-to-God, capital-C Cinema to me. Part of that is just what happens when you shoot a Western – even a Western that was made in New Zealand, which does just a terrific job standing in for Montana – but any bozo can make pretty landscapes look pretty. What Wegner and Campion are up to is mounting a box around those landscapes, and then pinning humans like dead butterflies into that box, feeling overwhelmed by the world around them in wide shot after wide shot, often recklessly centering the subjects in ways that aren’t “right”, which of course just adds to the sense of a world going awry. And the closer shots have their own special power, with Campion’s wonderful old trick of carefully slicing the sets into planes using focal depth getting an amazing work-out. This benefits Dunst, especially, who is often defined entirely as the lost Other floating between two opposed but equally unwelcoming worlds of rowdy outdoorsmen and stuffy gentility, and frequently seems to be in an entirely different room from the other castmembers, given the great gulfs of separation Wegner is able to put between her and them.
Going through every neat trick of composition in The Power of the Dog would mean describing basically every shot (I’ll only do one other: at one point, Phil is in a river, a moment of literal nakedness and vulnerability he offers himself with great caution, and this is neatly captured in a frame where the camera is tilted down at the surface of the water at such an acute angle that the surface of the river rises above the midway point of the frame, like a horizon line; it feels like we should be partially submerged and yet we float, and the effect is beautifully weightless and free, while also being uncomfortably imbalanced). It’s the kind of movie for which no amount of enthusiasm in praise of its craftsmanship and aesthetics would feel like hyperbole. I wish the the story was as sophisticated as the visuals; it feels like Campion is exerting herself to tease out barely-hidden tendrils of meaning from the slightest gestures and behaviors, right in the shadow of a neon sign telling us exactly what’s going on at all turns. Still, this is a robustly-executed version of that story, presenting all four of its leads with great opportunities to do some of the best character work of any of their careers, and letting grace and peace bubble up through the leathery meanness of the scenario in moving, surprising ways. If I am maybe too excited about it because I’ve been starved for Campion, or just for very excellent, confident filmmaking for so long, well, all that’s saying is that The Power of the Dog is still head and shoulders above anything else you’re likely to run into out there, and the only real problem I have with it is that I wish something so potent and beautiful got the theatrical run it deserved on the biggest screens with the clearest speakers, rather than living most of its lifespan as just another piece of content on Netflix.