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The Power of the Dog
The Power of the Dog
Benedict Cumberbatch travels to a far country in The Power of the Dog, proving that his range is wider than most of us had reason to suspect. Best known for playing smart Englishmen (Sherlock Holmes, Alan Turing), in The Power of the Dog he’s a lanky grizzled cowboy who walks with the bent gait of a man who spends too much time on the saddle. His Phil Burbank is unpleasant at first as well as second glance yet grows more complicated in a story that lives as much in its ellipsis as in its prose.
Writer-director Jane Campion (The Piano) adapted The Power of the Dog from Thomas Savage’s novel. The setting, Montana, 1925, is a bleak land dominated by the Burbank mansion, a clapboard Victorian monstrosity rearing up against the blank hillsides. It’s cattle country and Phil rides herd over an empire stretching far as he can see. The night scenes in the nearest town, a few wooden buildings strung along a rail line, suggest Edward Hopper’s rural paintings in their awful lonesomeness.
The plot is a study in tension, beginning with Phil who never ceases to deride his brother as fat and incapable. However, George Burbank lets those insults slide. Jesse Plemons plays George with a disarmingly mild manner similar to his role as the sociopath Todd Alquist in “Breaking Bad.” Here he’s a decent guy who has trouble hitching more than four words together at the same time. He marries out of compassion. His new wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst) is the widow of a suicide. When George meets her, she is up to her elbows in dishes to wash and chicken to fry at the only restaurant for many miles. Phil sneers at Rose but despises her teenage son even more. Peter is thin as a wire hanger, awkward and sensitive. He makes paper flowers to decorate mom’s restaurant. Phil uses one to light his cigar.
The Power of the Dog becomes a sinister pas de deux between Phil and Rose and Phil and Peter. When she plays Johan Strauss’ Radetzky March on the grand piano George bought her, Phil, uninvited, joins in from upstairs in a wildly discordant improvisation on banjo. Is his undisguised hostility to Peter, scorned as a “Nancy,” born of repressed homosexuality? Phil begins to roughly tutor Peter in horsemanship, trying to make a man of him … or?
The Power of the Dog critiques the all-American hyper-manly cowboy mystique. Phil and his hired hands are Marlboro men, rolling their own with spurs always jingle-jangling. Unlike his cowpokes, Phil chose this life. The Burbanks are wealthy, he studied classics at Yale (revealed off-handedly) but fell under the spell of a mysterious cowboy called Bronco Henry, a character who might have strode from a dime novel twirling a lasso. Unlike George, Phil has rejected civilization and its comforts. When their parents and the governor come for dinner, Phil would rather stay in the stable, unwashed and feral.
Throughout the film, tension simmers on all back burners. Someone will get hurt.
The Power of the Dog has received 12 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Lead Actor (Cumberbatch), Best Supporting Actor (Plemons) and Best Adapted Screenplay. It opens Friday, Feb. 11 at the Downer Theater.
