The Power of the Dog’s Unsettled Frontier By Ross Douthat
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/12/27/the-power-of-the-dogs-unsettled-frontier/#slide-1
A movie that actually deserves its Oscar buzz.
In an age of strong ideological pressures, there’s an unusual frisson when a drama sets up a group of archetypes, develops them in what seem at first like very politically predictable ways — and then suddenly takes the story somewhere well outside of the audience’s moral expectations. That’s the case with The Power of the Dog, a historical drama currently being held up as an Oscar front-runner: It plays for a while as a western version of The Shape of Water — the tediously Manichaean Best Picture winner that helped usher in the Age of Woke — only to take a third-act detour into much stranger and darker territory. Or rather, what feels like a detour — until you reach the end, think back, and realize that the turn was coming all along.
The movie is the first film from Jane Campion since 2009’s Bright Star; in the interim she made the murder serial Top of the Lake, which is a good example of how a drama can conform to ideological expectations — it’s a feminist-themed story about the horrors that wicked men inflict on women and children — and still be absolutely terrific.
But her new movie is more nonconformist. It was filmed in the rural expanses of New Zealand, in a landscape that looks like a more barren version of its setting, which is Montana in the 1920s, with the frontier closed but civilization still just a vulnerable imposition on the landscape. Embodying the civilizing impulse is a rancher named George (a fattened Jesse Plemons), who runs a big cattle ranch together with his brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). The brother represents a different set of impulses: Phil is a cowboy purist, taut and rough and filthy, and is obsessed with a long-dead mentor named Bronco Henry, who taught him all the ways of horses and survival.
He’s also simply vicious to anyone who doesn’t fit into his ideal world of harsh frontier masculinity, which soon enough means his brother’s new wife, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), the widowed mistress of a nearby hotel, and the son who comes along with her, the extremely tall and thin and delicate Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who makes paper flowers to decorate his mother’s table and goes outside and furiously hula-hoops when someone says something wounding to him.
When George installs Rose in the ranch’s big house, leaving Phil alone in the double bedroom the brothers once shared, he clearly has a vision of comfortable domesticity in mind — with his new wife playing the piano, for instance, to entertain Montana’s governor after dinner. But whatever his brother wants, it isn’t domesticity, and so Phil sets out to terrorize his new sister-in-law, to encourage her anxiety and push her deep into alcoholism — while also playing the bully with the fey and vulnerable-seeming Peter.
At this point in the story we have our archetypes: Phil is a paragon of Toxic Masculinity, George is the helpless Well-Meaning Guy who can’t really see how bad his brother is or might become, Rose is the Prisoner of Patriarchy, and Peter is the gay kid who’s there to be the martyr to homophobia. And homophobia, in the world of progressive archetypes, is almost always just a form of repressed homosexuality, so it isn’t surprising when the movie starts to develop the idea that Phil’s lifelong bachelorhood and excess of machismo may in fact be repressing an impulse that dare not speak its name.
But then the unexpected starts to happen, beginning with Phil suddenly shifting from persecuting Peter to making fumbling attempts to mentor him. And from that shift to the fatal ending, our sympathies, having been first pushed into a very predictable zone, are quite aggressively pushed out into unsettled territory. Sufficiently unsettled, in fact, to create an interesting amount of critical disagreement in the reviews I’ve read about where the movie actually ends up, whose side it’s taking (if it’s taking any side), and who the actual bad guy is in the story (if there is one).
My own view is that The Power of the Dog is functionally a horror movie. It’s using a western canvas, and teasing out the terrors lurking on the edges of that landscape, but it’s not so much a subversion or revision of the traditional western as a brutally impious answer to the pieties of revisionism — and maybe especially to the film to which it will be inevitably compared, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
Maybe that take is too cut-and-dried, not sufficiently ambiguous. But it’s a sign of a movie that actually deserves its Oscar buzz that I recommend seeing it and deciding for yourself.
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