The Power of the Dog

Everyman Bristol

Power of the Dog is definitely the sort of film that the sort of people who like this sort of film will like.

Critics are applying words like gothic, psychological, and even Ibsenesque to it. It's kind of a Western -- it certainly starts with ranchers driving cattle through the desert -- and Western is a respectable movie genre, although this isn't by any stretch of the imagination a genre western. (There are motorcars and even a telephone, so the West is not in fact particularly Wild.) The Guardian said it was the best film of 2021 (even better than the Eternals or Shang Chi!) and it's up for Oscars and Baftas. 

It's terribly good. Everyone does a lot of acting, but it’s that quiet, understated, hardly-there-at-all acting which doesn’t lend itself very well to Oscar clips. I enjoyed the Zane-Gray-book-cover American landscape, particularly considering its filmed in New Zealand. Sofa-buddy enjoyed the interior decor. A lot of the action takes place in the rancher's rather grand house.

So what, actually, is it about? 

Well, there are two brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons). They’ve fairly recently inherited their father’s ranch. While driving cattle across the country, and disappointingly not calling out “git alawng litte dawgies” even once, they stay at a Saloon run by a widow lady named Rose (Kirsten Dunst, the last M.J but two). George falls quietly and un-demonstrably in love with her while . Phil takes an immediate and irrational dislike to her teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who doesn’t do manly things literally prefers making paper flowers, reading books, and saying “Hello clouds, hello sky”. Rose and Peter come back to live at the brothers' ranch and then -- well -- stuff happens. Deep, gothic, psychological, Ibsenesque stuff.

It’s a hard movie to talk about. It’s very dense and complex: a lot of the plot is foreshadowed in a speech over the opening credits; but it wasn’t clear to me on a first viewing who was speaking, so the significance only becomes clear in retrospect. It isn’t a twist-ending Whodunnit, and there are no mysterious sledges, but you don’t definitely know what’s been going on until the very final image of the film, which rather forces you to go back and reassess everything which has just happened. 

Sofa-Buddy and I spent the ride home saying “Did he do that particular thing because....?” “Did he know that particular thing would happen, or was that coincidence...?” “What did he decide to do that particular thing...?” It was made by Netflex so I assume it is online and it would certainly benefit from a second viewing. 

It isn’t merely a puzzle, though: nearly all the individual scenes are compelling pieces of drama in their own right. About half way through George asks the Governor and his “missus” to the ranch to meet his new wife; Phil refuses to take a bath or change out of his cowboy clothes, and Rose loses confidence and can’t play the grand piano that has been brought in specially for the occasion. Very bad things keep happening to bunny rabbits.

I do kind of see the comparison with Ibsen; in that the film unpeels the surface of a relatively ordinary family and reveals the dark underbelly underneath. There was even a slight whiff of Eugene O'Neil. It’s split into five numbered scenes (of uneven length) which fairly screams “please treat this as a classical tragedy” at the audience. It reminded me rather strongly of The Beguiled: the sense of claustrophobia; the characters frozen in time, not saying what they mean, and doing bad things in horribly oblique ways. Benedict Cumberbatch is neither Colin Farrell nor Clint Eastwood, but in his favour he isn’t Doctor Strange either. One rather suspects he went to his agent and said “Could you get me something which isn’t a Benedict Cumberbatch role? 

I am not quite sure I would have singled it out as Best Thing Of The Year but it was certainly the most compelling piece of cowboy themed psychodrama I saw last week. 

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