Jane Campion (2021)
The two films have precious little else in common but watching The Power of the Dog at the London Film Festival brought back the experience of seeing La La Land at the same event five years ago – the sinking feeling that comes with the realisation you’ll soon be seeing plenty more of a film you dislike as awards season rolls around … Jane Campion isn’t a prolific director: this revisionist western is her eighth cinema feature in thirty-two years and her first since Bright Star (2009). (In the meantime, she has made the two Top of the Lake TV mini-series.) The long wait for a new Campion is one reason why The Power of the Dog, which has already won its director the Venice Silver Lion, is being overrated. Solemnity and a snail’s-pace narrative are other factors. A film that takes the time this one takes to display its scrupulously composed visuals and insistent performances must be a masterwork, right?
Campion’s screenplay is an adaptation of a 1967 novel of the same name, by Thomas Savage. In 1920s Montana, the Burbank brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), are the latest generation of an established ranching family. On a cattle drive, they and their ranch hands stay overnight at a small-town inn, run by the widowed Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) with the help of her teenage son, gawky, transparently sensitive Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). He waits on tables and crafts the paper flower decorations that adorn them. During the evening meal, Phil makes fun of Peter’s effeminate handiwork and manner, to the amusement of the other cowboys – except for his quiet, incongruously well-dressed brother. When George goes to the kitchen to settle up, he finds Rose weeping, from overwork and distress at Phil’s treatment of her son. Before they’ve left the inn, George is lending a hand with waiting duties – the prelude to his courtship of Rose. It’s not long before, to Phil’s astonished fury, his brother brings her back to the ranch as his wife.
The opening voiceover to The Power of the Dog announces that:
‘When my father passed I wanted nothing more than my mother’s happiness. For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? If I did not save her?’
Within the next fifteen minutes, it’s become clear this young male voice belongs to Peter Gordon (shown visiting the hillside grave of his late father) and that Phil Burbank will be his chief adversary. We spend the remainder of the film – the best part of two hours – waiting for Peter to realise his saviour responsibilities, with Phil on the receiving end. There are regular hints of how this will come about. At the very start, as the cattle drive sets off, Phil spots a dead cow and warns George to ‘keep our cattle away … anthrax – don’t touch!’ Peter in due course switches from paper floristry to medical studies, with an evident specialty in dissecting animals. In the film’s finale, the symptoms of Phil’s sudden, fatal illness suggest that he died of anthrax. George and Rose attend his funeral, where Peter is conspicuous by his absence. From his bedroom window, in The Power of the Dog‘s closing shot, he eerily watches his black-clad mother and her husband returning to the ranch.
The story isn’t as simple as that makes it sound though it is, the way Jane Campion tells it, deeply obvious. Phil, from the start, is scornful of ‘Fatso’ George; after the surprise marriage, he treats his new sister-in-law with a colder contempt – except when he wants to tantalise her. George buys Rose a piano; as she stutters through the Radetzky March, Phil, on the floor above, strums the Strauss music on his banjo more dexterously, looking down on Rose in more ways than one. She is soon dissatisfied with her dull, well-meaning husband, and seems drawn, in spite of herself, to malignant, smelly Phil. (He rarely changes his clothes or takes a bath, other than by occasionally coating himself in mud and swimming naked in a river.) You know Rose won’t get anywhere with him, though – not because Phil is the bastard he seems to be but because, hardly less conspicuously, this macho homophobe is a repressed, self-hating homosexual.
The revelation of his true nature is largely a matter of joining the dots. It’s very early on when Phil first invokes the memory of ‘Bronco Henry’, who worked for their parents, raising a toast to ‘us, brothers, Romulus and Remus, and the wolf who raised us’. You could already put money on the brothers’ late, beloved mentor being, to Phil, more than just the ‘greatest rider I ever saw’ (Bronco’s saddle is his most treasured possession). You can bet, too, that uncouth Phil’s surprising classical reference will be meaningful: sure enough, he was ‘Phi Beta Kappa at Yale’, where he read classics. The hostility between him and Peter is replaced by a wary rapport once the young man, hanging around the river where Phil is bathing, discovers in a nearby shack his cache of adult magazines. Phil eventually tells Peter that Bronco once ‘saved my life… we were way off up in the hills, shooting out and the weather turned mean. Bronco kept me alive by lying body against body in a bed roll. Fell off to sleep that way’. By this stage, I almost expected Peter to reply, ‘Like in Brokeback Mountain?’ (In fact, he comes up with a one-word question – ‘Naked?’ Phil answers in the affirmative.)
You instantly suspect there’s more to Phil than meets the eye and ear also because Benedict Cumberbatch is playing him. For as long as Phil is simply vicious and callous, Cumberbatch comes across as an actor acting nasty. There’s a logic to that, of course: vulnerable beneath the toxic masculinity, the character, too, is putting on an act. Yet the act’s unnaturalness makes it hard to believe that Phil is popular with, as well as respected by, the men that he and George employ. Cumberbatch shows considerable nerve and talent – he has devised a fine, tense gait – but Jane Campion does him no favours. She tends to keep the camera on all her actors for too long, regardless of whether new things emerge from them during that time. In the case of the improbably tall, skinny Kodi Smit-McPhee, the camera is merely staring at a curiosity, whose expression doesn’t change much. In Cumberbatch’s case, it’s observing a gifted performer at work – and evidently so. Campion’s penchant for dwelling on faces may explain her partiality for the magnetic but emotionally slow-moving Elisabeth Moss, who starred in both Top of the Lake series and was the original choice to play Rose. Benedict Cumberbatch is naturally equipped to change tone and mood more nimbly than Moss. As a result, his performance in The Power of the Dog is compelling but artificial.
Although disadvantaged in a similar way to Cumberbatch, Moss’s replacement Kirsten Dunst does somewhat animate, through the force of youthful glamour, the story’s Freudian aspect (book-ended in the implication of Peter’s opening voiceover and a concluding attribution of the film’s title, a biblical verse -‘Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog’ – from Psalm 22). It’s a cliché that Rose, miserable on the ranch, turns to drink but when, in her cups and in her slip, she almost throws herself at Peter, it can hardly assuage Oedipal feelings. Kodi Smit-McPhee, however, rather confuses the issue – as well as the import of the shifting relationship between him and Phil – by making Peter, more than anything else, asexual. The Oedipal aspect is also muffled by the increasingly minor importance in the narrative of the man who has become Rose’s new husband. That Peter chooses to study to be a doctor – as his biological father was – is ambiguous.
These uncertainties, whether or not intentional, are no bad thing in such an over-controlled piece of cinema. The problem with The Power of the Dog isn’t with its themes, which are interesting, but with Jane Campion’s approach to them. Although I’ve made elements in the plot sound silly, their silliness isn’t an intrinsic quality – it’s the effect of ponderous, relentlessly portentous storytelling. The screening I attended was subtitled for the hard of hearing. Whenever Jonny Greenwood’s music played, the subtitles supplied an explanatory adjective, nearly always ‘uneasy’. Too right. It’s no surprise the cast members who fare best are in smaller roles. It’s true Jesse Plemons is a consistently strong actor but he’s probably helped by the diminishing attention given to George. Two days after seeing Last Night in Soho, I again enjoyed watching Thomasin McKenzie, this time in the small role of Lola, a maid at the ranch house. McKenzie is a fresh, amusing and enlivening presence (especially in a sequence where Lola is unexpectedly asked to umpire an impromptu game of tennis between Peter and his mother).
The real stars of the film, though, are Montana’s mountains – albeit they’re actually in Campion’s native New Zealand, where shooting took place. It’s a mark of the physical scale of the landscape the characters inhabit that mountains are often referred to as hills – as when Phil tells Peter that most people looking at them ‘just see a hill’. Bronco Henry, needless to say, was different. Phil asks, ‘What do you suppose he saw?’ and is startled by Peter’s immediate reply – ‘a barking dog’. I couldn’t see the beast but the mountains, as photographed and lit by Ari Wegner, do provoke anthropomorphising thoughts: they look to have secrets they mean to keep.
I preferred the second Top of the Lake (subtitled China Girl) to its predecessor, thanks largely to the vivifying contribution of Nicole Kidman (who also did well in Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996)). Yet it was the first Top of the Lake that won plaudits and prizes. Of the four Campion films I’ve now seen – the four I haven’t are Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003) – Bright Star is not only the best but also, it seems, the least typical. Campion’s exploration of the relationship of Fanny Brawne and John Keats inventively re-energised period drama; the two hours of screen time passed rapidly; the actors were nuanced and emotionally fluid. None of those things can be said of this new work. The Power of the Dog showcases the worst of Jane Campion – a persisting tendency to overstate her themes and luxuriate in the images she has created – to probably Oscar-winning effect.
12 October 2021
