The Power of the Dog

This movie wants to be a lot of things, until it wants to be something else. It wants to explore the dynamics and struggles of ranching in the 1920’s between two brothers, one a rough, caustic, domineering man (Benedict Cumberbatch), and the other a thoughtful, soft-spoken romantic (Jesse Plemons). This could be the foundation for a touching drama as the brothers come to understand one another over the course of the movie, or perhaps splinter further apart in their power struggle. Dog does neither of those; it has no interest in showing anything beyond their being different, and uses Plemons’ thoughtful, considerate brother as a lever to insert other characters into the story. It wants to explore the way siblings can be put on the back foot with one another when one of them gets in a relationship and the other doesn’t. Except that, as soon as Kirsten Dunst’s Rose is brought into the mix at the ranch. Plemons’ George starts fading into the background. He shows up to facilitate plot points, but it’s the plot points of others; how  the resentment Cumberbatch’s Phil feels towards Rose affects his relationship with George is never touched upon. Phil hates Rose because hashtag reasons, and when George is seen, he’s a vessel for the movie to movie. It wants to explore gender roles and repression of self and sexuality through thinly veiled hints of Phil and Rose’s son Peter. Phil is masculine to the point of parody, a Marlboro Man cutout in action, while Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is coded gay in a way that seems pandering to stereotypes. Oh, he presses flowers and draws and wears impractical nice shoes instead of practical ones! I know homosexuality wouldn’t be tolerated in the prairies of America in the 1920’s (or, likely, anywhere in the country at the time), but instead of shading in the characters with subtlety and depth, director Jane Campion chose to color them in as bluntly and obviously as possible. It then compounds the error by not actually exploring these ideas; Phil is covering up latent homosexuality by being overly macho. Peter is as embracing of it as one can be in the time and place, but still seems to be negatively affected by it. That’s all the movie has to say about it. There’s no exploration, no coming to terms. Hell, the movie can’t even build a proper relationship between the two; they go from bully-victim to mentor-student in one scene, just to move the movie forward. It wants to be this heartwarming story of a jerk who, over time, is softened by exposure to familial love. Unfortunately, it 1) never earns that softening, as Phil just goes from bully to buddy like a flipped switch, but also 2) he doesn’t experience this softening with anybody else. Moreover, as Phil’s relationship with Peter grows, Rose fades to the background only to pop up once in a while to remind the viewer she’s drunk, and George disappears entirely for a solid half hour. If this relationship is having any effect of softening Phil, there is no evidence of it, because he almost never interacts with anyone else for the last 40 or so minutes of the And on top of THAT, the relationship never feels genuine; I constantly felt it was either a ploy to drive Rose and her son apart, a way to toughen up a kid Phil saw as too effeminate to survive in the world, or both. Not once did I believe he actually cared about Peter, and not once did the movie try to explain why Peter would suddenly be okay with hanging around with this guy who has tormented his mother. It wants to be all of these things and more. There’s hints Phil might be cozying up to Peter to drive Rose insane. There’s hints Peter might be mentally disturbed. It develops none of these. At best, the movie waves at them while passing them by at high speed. And the ending is so out of place and tone with the rest of the movie, it’s like stapling the last five minutes of Psycho onto Little Women. It is a twist that is breadcrumbed (mostly in retrospect), at no point is it earned. For a movie as methodical as this, for it to be so focused on relationships and emotions and cerebral concepts as it is, the movie has a woeful attention span, picking up and putting down storylines at random, leaving the whole movie feeling aimless and inert. It moves forward like a teenager driving a car for the first time; in sudden lurches and neck-snapping stops. It’s a shame, because the acting here is excellent. Everybody’s got their working shoes on; Cumberbatch and Plemons are interestingly cast against type (one could easily see Plemons as the hard case and Cumberbatch as the quiet romantic), and it works surprisingly well. Dunst doesn’t get much to do but be sad and out of her element, but she puts her all into it. And Smit-McPhee does a fine job as well. Director Jane Campion has a fantastic eye for capturing the world and making it feel like a character in and of itself. And Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) provides a truly haunting and unique score, full of violin and piano and guitar used in some unique ways. As Rose’s alcoholism grows, the score behind her becomes more jagged and discordant and unpleasant; as she falls apart, so does the score. It’s a nice touch. But all that professionalism can’t save a script that has a ton of ideas where to go but never commits to any of them, and the one idea it does explore, it does so with the tact and restraint of a kindergartner on Red Bull. All the acting and beautiful landscapes and delicate score can’t force a movie to coalesce if it just doesn’t want to.