BARING IT ALL IS A POWERFUL FORCE
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH ASKS YOU TO EASE UP ON HATING ‘POWER OF THE DOG’S’ PHIL, FOR WHOM HE LEFT HIS HEART, SOUL AND OTHER, AHEM, ASSETS ON SCREEN
ENEDICT CUMBERBATCH knows you have questions about that “Power of the Dog” ending. He has questions too. Maybe they’re the same ones. But before he dives in — and this is a man prone to picking apart and parsing, so settle in — Cumberbatch would like to make a statement. And before we hand him the floor, it should go without saying that if you haven’t seen “The Power of the Dog,” which has been available for months now, you should not be reading this story because we’re going to be talking about the ending that everyone has been discussing and dissecting since the end of, ahem, last year. ¶ Now that we have that out of the way, Cumberbatch would like to say that he very much hopes you felt bad when his character, the menacing, hyper-masculine cattle rancher Phil Burbank, dies at the end of the movie. He doesn’t expect that you broke down weeping or anything. (Phil wouldn’t want that.)
But Cumberbatch thinks people are taking juuuuust a bit too much pleasure in Phil’s death.
And while the 45-year-old actor can understand why audiences cheer for Peter (played by Oscar nominee Kodi Smit-McPhee), the young man who does a seeming 180 and murders Phil to protect his mother, Rose (another Oscar nominee, Kirsten Dunst), and avenge the way Phil mistreated her, Cumberbatch thinks people are missing some larger issues as well. For one: how Phil’s malevolence comes from a place of selfloathing and self-protection as a closeted gay man living in Montana in 1925.
“I’m feeling the whiff of a popularity contest in the reaction,” Cumberbatch tells me over a lunch conversation not long ago. “It’s reductive: ‘Phil’s the mean guy. Peter’s the hero.’ It’s not that simple. I think people better watch out for Peter.” Cumberbatch dips a fry into ketchup and begins musing about the future of Phil’s brother, George (Jesse Plemons, yes, another Oscar nominee), whose marriage to Rose sets the film’s plot in motion.
“Peter hides the rope under the bed ... why does he do that?” Cumberbatch asks, mentioning the object Phil and Peter made together, the one fashioned with the anthraxinfected rawhide that Peter supplied, unbeknownst to Phil. “I think he’s going to kill George. Nice as George is, he’s still in the way of the Oedipal complex and the full Anthony Perkins takeover, you know?”
Cumberbatch is half-kidding, but it’s not the last time he drops a reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” in the conversation. I’ve heard others
embrace his take on Peter over the past couple of months. Smit-McPhee, though, isn’t having it.
“I think murdering Phil is a onetime thing,” Smit-McPhee tells me. “Killing Phil was just something he had to do, and now he’s gone on with his life.” He smiles. “I think Benedict might be a little too close to Phil still, which I can understand. I feel the same way about Peter.”
In the film, Peter’s and Phil’s paths first cross at the restaurant at the Montana inn run by Rose. During a fried chicken dinner with George and the ranch hands the brothers employ, Phil makes disparaging remarks about Peter, whom he perceives as effeminate. Phil also burns the paper roses that Peter made as centerpieces. (Smit-McPhee believes Peter decides to murder Phil right then and there.)
Some time later, after George and Rose marry, Peter comes to the ranch to live with his mother. By this point, Phil’s psychological warfare (all that whistling and banjo playing!) has driven Rose to alcoholism, and the initial prospects for his treatment of Peter don’t look much better. Phil and the ranch hands taunt Peter. But to Cumberbatch, Phil’s motivation for doing this might have less to do with destroying Peter than to “rip the umbilical cord from his mother’s womb.”
“Phil’s teaching Peter to ride, to tie the rope, and he’s looking over at Rose, thinking, ‘I’ve got your f— boy and I’m tying him to me. He’s mine now,’ ” Cumberbatch says. “You could view the purpose of his recruitment as an act of tough love.”
While making the lasso on that final night together in the barn, >