It’s almost too perfect that The Power of the Dog—Jane Campion’s best film since her 1993 masterpiece The Piano—also prominently features a piano.
Certainly that’s not what prompted her to adapt the Thomas Savage novel about two brothers (Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemmons) who run a cattle ranch in 1925 Montana. After a quarter century of rough, rowdy work, the brothers’ shared routine is upended when Plemmons’ George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a local widow. Moving into the manly family mansion, she brings along Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), her effeminate, college-age son. That plot description alone suggests other affinities with Campion’s filmography besides a certain instrument: raw emotions increasingly frayed amidst unforgiving natural settings; a sensuous deconstruction of traditional masculinity; desires of different kinds, some of which carry real danger.
Of course, there is still the piano. George, knowing that Rose once provided live accompaniment for public movie screenings, moves a baby grand into the mansion, where it sits with delicate sophistication amidst the stout leather chairs and mounted animal heads. (The production design squeezes all sorts of portent and personality out of the story’s stark setting.) Cumberbatch’s Phil—who made it immediately clear that he disapproves of Rose, calling her a “cheap schemer” on her first night in his home—turns the instrument into a tool of torture. When she plays, stumbling to remember the right keys to Johann Strauss’ “Radetzky March,” Phil mockingly plucks the same notes on his banjo upstairs in his room. (Campion’s camera moves in on Rose, pausing whenever Phil’s plucking causes her to stop playing, in a way that’s positively Hitchcockian.)
Why is Phil so cruel? That is the film’s central question. As we spend some two hours considering it, Cumberbatch makes every moment he’s onscreen mesmerizing—entertaining and terrifying at the same time. There hasn’t been a performance this crucial to a Campion film since Holly Hunter’s bravura turn as Ada in The Piano. We immediately notice the way Phil carries himself around the ranch, especially amidst the cowboys always milling about: ramrod straight, with loud purposeful steps, always certain of where he’s going and what he means to do. (Plemmons, meanwhile, moves softly, leisurely, with a similar confidence but one that’s thoughtfully held.) Somehow, however, Phil is even more intimidating when he’s quiet: softly fingering a paper flower, say, or twirling a kitchen chair on its leg with surprising grace. And then there is his voice: guttural, growling, at times reminiscent of John Wayne and at others—especially when he softly whistles the Strauss piece to further torment Rose—recalling the menacing purr of Robert Mitchum as the false preacher in The Night of the Hunter.
All of this adds up to an outsized performance of the sort I’ve come to expect from Cumberbatch. He’s a showboat, therefore well-suited for a part that requires exactly that quality. The more we learn about Phil the more we realize that he is a performer. And as is often the case with our most demonstrative actors, they usually do their best work when playing someone who is, in some way, acting.
Still, it’s strange having a man as the gravitational center of a Campion movie. It certainly makes Dunst’s performance harder to gauge. A demure woman who responds to the difficulties of her new life by turning to drink, Rose stands apart from the long line of indomitable Campion women—not only Hunter’s Ada, but also Kate Winslet’s Ruth (Holy Smoke); Kerry Fox’s Janet Frame (An Angel at My Table); and Abbie Cornish’s Fanny Brawne (Bright Star). Tremulous and tenderhearted, Dunst’s Rose is more of a damaged figure along the lines of Meg Ryan’s Frannie (In the Cut) or Nicole Kidman’s Isabel (The Portrait of a Lady). Appropriately, Dunst portrays her with a slowly sinking tragic sadness that seems slight in the moment, but lingers long after the movie has ended.
And so the performances in The Power of the Dog are excellent across the board. (Smit-McPhee has a disarming vulnerability that’s crucial to making the turn the movie takes, involving Peter’s place within this makeshift family, ultimately work.) But what of the visuals, another hallmark of Campion’s career? Just when you think the movies have given us every stunning vista of the American West imaginable, she and cinematographer Ari Wagner find new ways to take your breath away (the movie was actually filmed in New Zealand). Their camera is particularly attentive to the way light is filtered through the massive clouds that roll across the open sky. The morphing shadows cast on the hills below are not only mythically gorgeous, but also evocative of the continually shifting emotions, identities, and desires experienced by the characters.
More intimate imagery also abounds: the frequently shirtless cowboys carefully posed while at their chores, like the lithe French Foreign Legion soldiers in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail; a close-up of that paper flower, which Phil eventually sets on fire in another wicked gesture; an insert shot of a bloody hand thrust into a pail of water. Adding to the tensile sensuousness is Jonny Greenwood’s deceptively delicate score, which combines the propulsiveness of his work in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood with a quaint, period simplicity. I don’t believe he employs a piano in the most prominent themes, which is probably for the best. That really would have been too perfect.
(11/14/2021)
