Post by Dracula on Dec 4, 2021 10:24:39 GMT -5
The Power of the Dog(11/24/2021)
It is a strange irony that, right when the appetite for her films seemed stronger than ever Jane Campion kind of took a decade off. We have not seen a feature length film from the New Zealand auteur since 2009’s Bright Star and she instead spent the 2010s making television, namely the two seasons of her mystery series “Top of the Lake.” It’s hard to know if this move to television was entirely her choice or if this was kind of forced by funding issues and if it was that, well, I guess I’m part of the problem since I skipped out on seeing Bright Star at the time… still haven’t, and I haven’t actually seen many of the other movies she made between now and her 1993 breakthrough The Piano though I am more versed in her earlier work. In my defense I was too young to see any of those movies aside form Bright Star when they were in theaters but maybe I should have been more diligent in catching up with her work? Maybe not, a lot of those movies she made in the 90s and early 2000s (The Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke, In the Cut) were not really deemed essential by critical consensus and those earlier movies were not always the easiest movies to love either. She’s a fairly prickly filmmaker who makes things with a pretty specific mindset that isn’t always the easiest to jive with. Regardless people want to hear what she has to say now and she’s gotten funding from Netflix to make her latest effort, a western with an impressive cast called The Power of the Dog.
Campion’s latest film is an adaptation of a 1967 novel of the same named by Thomas Savage and is set largely on a ranch in Montana circa 1925. This ranch appears to be highly successful and sports a mansion with luxuries like a tennis court and is owned by a pair of brothers: George Burbank (Jesse Plemons), who has taken to wearing suits and has become more at home with his acquired wealth, and Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), who proudly remains a rough and tumble cowboy. This is the conflict that underlines much of the film and it comes to something of a head when George takes a liking to a local restaurateur named Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) a widow with a roughly college aged son named Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who doesn’t quite seem at home in this western milieu. As George starts to build a new life with Rose we start to see an intense jealousy emerge in Phil that will impact the trajectory of the Ranch going forward.
The Power of the Dog is a western in terms of setting and to some degree iconography but perhaps not in terms of traditional story structure and genre tropes. For one thing there is no action in the film whatsoever and I’m not sure I even spotted any guns in the film even as background objects. Insomuch as it’s a film about violence it’s a film about violence of a very interpersonal and perhaps self-directed kind. The film’s central character more or less is Phil, who in modern parlance could be called an embodiment of “toxic masculinity” but is perhaps better understood as an embodiment of anti-intellectualism. Despite having achieved great wealth as a rancher he refuses to drop his frontier ways and “civilize” himself, which would be fine, but he also refuses to even try to occasionally meet other people half-way (like when they ask him to take a bath on the eve from a visit to the house by the governor) and instead just assumes everyone else thinks less of him and resents them for their attempts at self-improvement and lashes out accordingly and tries to drag everyone else down to his level. It’s a mentality that’s kind of at the heart of a lot of the issues we’re dealing with in society today and I’m pretty sure that exploring this mentality is kind of at the heart of why Campion was probably interested in this material.
The first half of the film seems to set up a clear battle of wills between Phil Burbank and George Burbank and his family that you expect of escalate to some sort of violence or treachery by the film’s end. But then the film kind of takes an unexpected left turn in its second half and becomes something of an unexpected mentor/mentee film between Phil and George’s stepson Peter and it doesn’t really go out of its way to try to explain why Phil has suddenly become more agreeable. We get hints that this is rooted in something repressed/queer in both men but I’m not sure it’s ever quite totally explored or explained and it all leads to an ending that felt a bit abrupt and unsatisfying to me. I’m not sure I liked Kodi Smit-McPhee here at all and a lot of the actors don’t feel like they’re quite the right age. Smit-McPhee seems a bit too old, Benedict Cumberbatch should be a bit older, Kirsten Dunst should also be a smidge older, and Jesse Plemmons should be a lot older. The film has a lot of really cool landscapes that are shot beautifully by Campion and cinematographer Ari Wegner though I’m not sure it looks all that much like the state of Montana (which I tend to associate with being greener and more wooded). Honestly it’s a movie that I’m not entirely sure what to make of, it’s certainly made with skill but it seems to skip past some obviously important developments in the story in a way that felt more sloppy than bold to me and its ultimate message (which seems to boil down to “toxic men are secretly compensating for something”) does not really strike me as being as bold and insightful as it maybe thinks it is. On the other hand, I was consistently intrigued by the film pretty much the whole way through despite any reservations and I’m excited to revisit it and certainly hope Campion doesn’t make us wait another twelve years for her next effort.
**** out of Five
It is a strange irony that, right when the appetite for her films seemed stronger than ever Jane Campion kind of took a decade off. We have not seen a feature length film from the New Zealand auteur since 2009’s Bright Star and she instead spent the 2010s making television, namely the two seasons of her mystery series “Top of the Lake.” It’s hard to know if this move to television was entirely her choice or if this was kind of forced by funding issues and if it was that, well, I guess I’m part of the problem since I skipped out on seeing Bright Star at the time… still haven’t, and I haven’t actually seen many of the other movies she made between now and her 1993 breakthrough The Piano though I am more versed in her earlier work. In my defense I was too young to see any of those movies aside form Bright Star when they were in theaters but maybe I should have been more diligent in catching up with her work? Maybe not, a lot of those movies she made in the 90s and early 2000s (The Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke, In the Cut) were not really deemed essential by critical consensus and those earlier movies were not always the easiest movies to love either. She’s a fairly prickly filmmaker who makes things with a pretty specific mindset that isn’t always the easiest to jive with. Regardless people want to hear what she has to say now and she’s gotten funding from Netflix to make her latest effort, a western with an impressive cast called The Power of the Dog.
Campion’s latest film is an adaptation of a 1967 novel of the same named by Thomas Savage and is set largely on a ranch in Montana circa 1925. This ranch appears to be highly successful and sports a mansion with luxuries like a tennis court and is owned by a pair of brothers: George Burbank (Jesse Plemons), who has taken to wearing suits and has become more at home with his acquired wealth, and Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), who proudly remains a rough and tumble cowboy. This is the conflict that underlines much of the film and it comes to something of a head when George takes a liking to a local restaurateur named Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) a widow with a roughly college aged son named Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who doesn’t quite seem at home in this western milieu. As George starts to build a new life with Rose we start to see an intense jealousy emerge in Phil that will impact the trajectory of the Ranch going forward.
The Power of the Dog is a western in terms of setting and to some degree iconography but perhaps not in terms of traditional story structure and genre tropes. For one thing there is no action in the film whatsoever and I’m not sure I even spotted any guns in the film even as background objects. Insomuch as it’s a film about violence it’s a film about violence of a very interpersonal and perhaps self-directed kind. The film’s central character more or less is Phil, who in modern parlance could be called an embodiment of “toxic masculinity” but is perhaps better understood as an embodiment of anti-intellectualism. Despite having achieved great wealth as a rancher he refuses to drop his frontier ways and “civilize” himself, which would be fine, but he also refuses to even try to occasionally meet other people half-way (like when they ask him to take a bath on the eve from a visit to the house by the governor) and instead just assumes everyone else thinks less of him and resents them for their attempts at self-improvement and lashes out accordingly and tries to drag everyone else down to his level. It’s a mentality that’s kind of at the heart of a lot of the issues we’re dealing with in society today and I’m pretty sure that exploring this mentality is kind of at the heart of why Campion was probably interested in this material.
The first half of the film seems to set up a clear battle of wills between Phil Burbank and George Burbank and his family that you expect of escalate to some sort of violence or treachery by the film’s end. But then the film kind of takes an unexpected left turn in its second half and becomes something of an unexpected mentor/mentee film between Phil and George’s stepson Peter and it doesn’t really go out of its way to try to explain why Phil has suddenly become more agreeable. We get hints that this is rooted in something repressed/queer in both men but I’m not sure it’s ever quite totally explored or explained and it all leads to an ending that felt a bit abrupt and unsatisfying to me. I’m not sure I liked Kodi Smit-McPhee here at all and a lot of the actors don’t feel like they’re quite the right age. Smit-McPhee seems a bit too old, Benedict Cumberbatch should be a bit older, Kirsten Dunst should also be a smidge older, and Jesse Plemmons should be a lot older. The film has a lot of really cool landscapes that are shot beautifully by Campion and cinematographer Ari Wegner though I’m not sure it looks all that much like the state of Montana (which I tend to associate with being greener and more wooded). Honestly it’s a movie that I’m not entirely sure what to make of, it’s certainly made with skill but it seems to skip past some obviously important developments in the story in a way that felt more sloppy than bold to me and its ultimate message (which seems to boil down to “toxic men are secretly compensating for something”) does not really strike me as being as bold and insightful as it maybe thinks it is. On the other hand, I was consistently intrigued by the film pretty much the whole way through despite any reservations and I’m excited to revisit it and certainly hope Campion doesn’t make us wait another twelve years for her next effort.
**** out of Five
