Cumberbatch film a reminder ‘West’ rhymes with ‘repressed’
The gorgeous Otago region of New Zealand makes for one hell of a 1925 Montana in “The Power of the Dog,” the first feature written and directed by Jane Campion since “Bright Star” 12 years ago.
This adaptation of the 1967 Thomas Savage novel is worth seeing, and arguing with, for several reasons. It’s a chamber Western, focused on four main characters, and those warring personalities are played by the exactly-right quartet of Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-mcphee. The environment these forlorn souls call home works like a spacious dream of the Old West, shortly after it has given way to 20th-century notions of progress, including the automobile and the pianola.
Two successive establishing shots early in “The Power of the Dog” capture a long line of cattle against mountains on the horizon, followed by a shot of what appears to be a river of rawhide movement, more liquid than animal. This is a director with an indelible eye for the natural world and the people up against it, visually and metaphorically.
Campion adapts the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. The cattle baron brothers George and Phil Burbank have built up their business and bunked in the same childhood bed together since “nineteen and nuthin’,” as Phil (Cumberbatch) puts it. Phil’s the smarter, more calculating of the two. He’s also a casually wily sadist, tormenting brother George (Plemons) by calling him “Fatso,” humiliating the quietly lisping teenage son Peter (Smit-mcphee) of Rose (Dunst). She’s what Phil cruelly dismisses as a golddigging “suicide widow,” working in the apparent sole restaurant in the nearby speck of a town called Beech.
The external conflict in “The Power of the Dog” comes from George and Rose’s marriage, and how it encroaches on Phil’s habits, routines and male sanctum. The internal conflicts, meanwhile, course through everyone’s psyches. Phil lives in the memory of his long-dead cowboy mentor and friend, Bronco Henry, whose hallowed saddle Phil treats as a shrine.
By accident one day, young Peter stumbles upon Phil’s secluded swimming hole, where Phil slathers himself with mud and floats, nude, alone (he thinks) with his thoughts and memories. In this Western, like many others before it, “West” rhymes with “repressed” for a reason. When Peter’s not away in town for school, studying to be a doctor like his late father, he coexists uneasily with his mother and stepfather at the ranch home. Phil sees this tender soul as his personal project. He’s out to make a man out of him, partly for the cowhands’ sport, partly for his own mixed motives.
Everyone’s good in this film, with Cumberbatch’s violently conflicted rancher the instigating tragedy in the making. The character’s pure aggravation at first. But there’s a sneaky wit in the performance, with Campion deftly lifting phrases from Savage’s novel and inventing a few of her own.
For Campion, the personifications of Western heroism and toughness are practically indistinguishable from their own nightmarish distortions. “The Power of the Dog” lays out this theme pretty bluntly, in a story that can feel a mite thin. It’s also well worth your time, because it imagines the time, place and people it’s about so intriguingly. Campion, cinematographer Ari Wegner, the entire design team knew what they wanted. And got it. full nudity)
Running time: 2:06
How to watch: Streaming on Netflix Dec. 1