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The Power of the Dog and the Traumas of Destructive Masculinity


Jane Campion hasn’t directed a movie in thirteen years. It’s astonishing the first woman to win the Palme d’Or for Directing (on The Piano, 1993) has gone so long without making a new film. Granted, she did write and direct a well-received TV series, Top of the Lake, in the time since her 2008 romance Bright Star. But the world of cinema has missed her, especially as such an important groundbreaker for women filmmakers, lauded for her great women characters and feminist themes -in these regards, The Piano is still a favourite among many critics. So it’s a bit surprising that her 2021 return to movies is a story about a man.
And not just about a man, but that mans’ relationship to masculinity. The Power of the Dog, based on a novel by Thomas Savage, is the story of a Montana rancher in the 1920s who fancies himself a rough, hardened cowboy, and comes into conflict with the encroaching irrelevance of those values he’s lived by and appropriated. He is threatened by his brothers’ marriage to a widow and subsequent civilizing, as well as her timid son who can perhaps read him too well. Benedict Cumberbatch plays this confused, volatile, violent figure Phil Burbank, a frightening individual whose mere presence in a scene can make your skin crawl.
At one point he’s just hanging there in the background eating an apple (because of course) while his sister-in-law Rose (Kirsten Dunst) struggles to play piano for their guests. It’s an embarrassing situation that her husband George (Jesse Plemons), can’t understand -but we know exactly the cause. Every time she got down to practice there was Phil, taunting and creeping on her, suspicious of her and her intents from the moment she married his brother -and determined to subtly make her life hell. He’s a loathsome bastard and a great character, possibly Cumberbatch’s best, as he epitomizes the facets by which toxic masculine behaviour can devastate lives. It’s his quiet antagonism towards Rose that drives her to drink, his ugly mockery of her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) that makes him retreat inwards and feel ashamed. But if he were just a ruthless sociopath he wouldn’t be so interesting -there are more layers to Phil which only further emphasize the indictment Campion is making on toxic male culture. Like racism after all, toxic masculinity is not innate, it is taught.
Bronco Henry comes up a lot in the film -and almost always by Phil. In one of the earliest scenes, while he and George are riding together, he reflects on some fond memories with their late mentor, including hunting and taking them out for their first sexual excursions. Every time the name of Bronco Henry is evoked it’s with the utmost reverence as an exemplar of manly wild west life, and he’s clearly the model to which Phil compares himself and others. Bronco Henry never settled down, so for George to do so is a betrayal –especially with a widow, already a previous mans’ sexual conquest. Bronco Henry was a rough wilderness man, a cowboy in that idealistic sense of the term, so Phil styles himself in those trappings: keeping his facial hair unkempt, his clothes dirty, and usually wearing oversized chaps. In fact, he is obsessed with the image Bronco Henry passed on to him and with Bronco Henry himself. Left to his own devices, we see he has a lot of pent-up sexual confusion over his late master as well -deeply repressed feelings and urges  that have no healthy way to manifest.
Phil is not really the rugged frontier man he likes to think he is. It’s a mask that he never takes off except in solitude, because its’ the only acceptable form of masculinity to him, and it requires he be tough and cruel and hideously misogynistic. But it’s also a terribly transparent disguise, he often overcompensates -there’s no reason he has to tan his hides or castrate his cows with his bare hands, but he does so anyway to prove he’s got the stomach for it, and the grit. His ranch-hands don’t seem to suspect anything when he rides along the bank of a river watching them bathe. Surely though it doesn’t fool Peter -who winds up in an unexpected position of power over Phil leading to a dramatic shift in their relationship. Rather than ostracize him, Phil begins to mould Peter into that same kind of hardened masculinity. Perpetuating the cycle is the only solution, the only way Phil’s been taught. The product of a warped social psychology as well as an immaculate cowboy.
Cumberbatch exhibits all this baggage with an intensity not demonstrated before, but his isn’t the only performance worthy of commendation. Dunst is at her best in years, dealing with a lot of vivid trauma, and centres one of the films’ best scenes of defiance. Plemons is quite good too –and Thomasin McKenzie is very conspicuous in her minor role as a maid. But it’s Kodi Smit-McPhee who drives the movie almost as much as Cumberbatch. Smit-McPhee has low-key been one of the best young actors of the last decade, really showing the breadth of his talents in Alpha particularly. He plays this part with a smart attentiveness to mood and body language, which evolve gradually as Peter develops and is apparently shaped by Phil. But he’s more enigmatic than Phil, more cunning, and motivated by a certain impulse. There’s a coldness there too, a dark side. Even before he’s taken under Phil’s wing, he kills and dissects a rabbit that his mother had become fond of –for the purposes of study. Smit-McPhee is very good at making you root for Peter’s sly long game, while encouraging distance in how you relate to him.
As this drama plays out, Campion directs the hell out of this film, casting her themes of repression against a scale that is both large and small –same as The Piano. She masters the atmosphere of the piece as well, honing in on those little moments of tension that make rich the films’ abiding message –Rose trying to talk to Peter about Phil for instance while he casually carries firewood in in the background; the emphasis on Phil’s POV staring down at her out of a window, and of course everything about the exemplary final scene. Her screenplay simmers with interesting dialogue and intelligent plotting, she makes strong compositional choices, and that same feminist touch that got her so noted in the 90s, is all over the films’ textured interrogation of masculinity and compassionate consideration of Rose’s place in this dreadful world.
The title comes from a Biblical passage read by Peter near the movies’ end, from Psalms 22:20: “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.” The dog may refer literally to Phil, but it also equates with toxic masculinity on a whole, the film showcasing the intricate ways it flourishes and devastates, harming not only women entrapped within that sphere of influence, but men’s psyches and their relationship to the world around them. Jane Campion has made one of the best films on this topic, it was worth the wait.

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