The Weak Are the Strong

The Power of the Dog a film by Jane Campion.  With Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, Kirstin Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee.  Streaming on Netflix.  *****

The Power of the Dog has such an air of menace that it’s almost unbearable to watch.  It’s set in Montana in the early part of the 20^th century (though it was filmed in New Zealand) but feels oddly contemporary, perhaps because of the smoldering anger of the protagonist, Phil Burbank, played brilliantly by Benedict Cumberbatch, in what seems an Academy Award performance.  He’s the kind of man who calls his brother Fatso though he isn’t especially fat (and anyway, what mature human being in middle age calls his adult brother, or anyone else, fatso), makes fun of some paper flowers that decorate a table where he is dining (he uses one to light one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, which he smokes constantly), and is especially delighted to find out that they were created not by the woman of the house, Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), but by her college-age son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee).  Phil immediately takes that as evidence that the young man is gay, and makes fun of him for that.  He gets plenty of chances to do that, because Phil’s brother George (Jesse Plemons) soon marries Rose, and she moves with them back to their huge prosperous Montana ranch.

Actually, if there’s a homoerotic group in this movie, it’s all these cowhands, who might consort with whores when they get a chance, but like it much more when they get back to the essentially male world of the ranch, where no woman really belongs, except maybe in the kitchen.  We see them later at the local swimming hole, skinny dipping and grabbing their crotches like guys in a locker room.  This is a world of masculine attitudes and masculine values.  Phil, for instance, more or less worships the man who taught him to be a cowpoke, a now legendary man named Bronco Henry, who died years before.  He talks about him constantly, and has a small shrine to him in the barn.

I detested Phil through the first two-thirds of this movie, and could not understand why he was so angry.  The odd thing was that, through my dislike of him, I could see certain admirable traits.  The ranch runs like a Swiss clock, and he’s the man in charge.  At one point we see him making rope out of cow hides (an important part of the plot, as it turns out; we eventually discover that almost every detail in the movie is important, including the fact that Phil is so macho he doesn’t even wear gloves when he’s castrating bulls).  He is an expert banjo picker, a real virtuoso.  And late in the movie, when the Governor visits (a cameo by one of my all-time favorite actors, Keith Carradine), we find out that Phil attended Yale, and was a classics major.  (At last, a job for classics majors.  They can become ranch hands.)

He makes fun of his sister-in-law’s efforts to play the piano (and contrasts them with his mastery of the banjo).  He also mocks her excessive drinking, which he sees as a weakness and which she has turned to because of the way he treats her.  He makes fun of her son’s fear of horses and cattle and that whole macho world, despite the fact that the young man is studying to be a doctor, and Phil, if he attended Yale, can’t be entirely anti-intellectual.  He keeps, consistently, calling his brother fat.  What the hell is this man’s problem?

Then much to my surprise, and perhaps to his own, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, Phil undergoes a change.  He sets out to make Peter a real man.  At first I thought it was just to make fun of him, and maybe that was his intention.  But Peter proves an apt pupil, even though not a natural, and in small subtle ways—especially by asking Phil about Bronco Henry—he penetrates the man’s angry demeanor and gets to know him in a way nobody else does.  They begin to have a friendship.  The whole thing becomes touching.

There’s a side to the movie that I’m not mentioning because I don’t want to spoil it, though a perceptive reader may already have seen it.  Peter—who is so tall and skinny that it’s almost worrisome—not only becomes an accomplished rider, and sees things in the mountain range that only Phil had previously seen, but he has a hidden strength we hadn’t perceived before.  When Phil brings up his mother’s drinking, he doesn’t deny it defensively the way most sons would, but freely admits it; it was a problem his father had also.  His father had hung himself—another thing that Phil regards as a weakness—and it turns out that Peter had been the one to find him, and cut him down.  He admits that fact with no shame or embarrassment.  We suddenly realize that it isn’t necessarily Phil who’s been controlling this relationship, but Peter, in a kind of ju jitsu where he never pits his strength against the other man, but lets the man’s strength work against him.  We begin to see that, in many ways, Smit-McPhee’s performance is every bit as brilliant as Cumberbatch’s.

That having been said, the most brilliant thing about this movie is the script and the direction, by the great Jane Campion.  Apparently the movie is based on a novel, by a writer I’d never heard of, and just unearthing that novel, and making a screenplay of it, was a brilliant move in itself.  This is the kind of movie that you want to watch again, because you suspect that, once you know how it ends, the whole movie will look different.  I thought it was a masterpiece, in absolutely every way.  I haven’t been more impressed by a film in years.