The Power of the Dog (2021) An inspirational Western for those with the patience to ride with it (Blu-Ray Review)

The word “literary” stalks descriptions of Jane Campion’s work like “quirky” does Wes Anderson’s, so let’s top-and-tail this review of Criterion’s Blu-Ray of her most recent film with some book talk. The most pleasingly unexpected extra here is an interview with Annie Proulx, who mentions getting a letter from The Power of the Dog‘s source author Thomas Savage shortly after Proulx’s landmark short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ was first published. Savage had read the rapturous reviews that hailed Proulx for finally acknowledging and dignifying the long-suppressed, long-sniggered-about strain of homosexuality in the Western, and he innocently wondered if she’d been influenced by his novel.

She hadn’t. In fact, Proulx – no dilettante when it comes to Western literature – hadn’t even heard of The Power of the Dog, which is one reason why Campion’s film is such an unexpected treat. Nobody in 2021 was thirsting for a Thomas Savage adaptation, there was no excited online chatter about who would fill the role of the book’s monstrous anti-hero Phil Burbank: the only reason the film exists is because Jane Campion wanted to make it. It’s a rare sight in the modern film world, and for all the wheels are falling off the Netflix bandwagon it’s worth asking whether anyone else would fund something like this: an unmistakably prestigious picture that is nevertheless interior, psychological, in an unfashionable genre, without an obvious hook. We’ve seen LGBTQ+ Westerns before, thanks to Ang Lee’s adaptation of the above-mentioned Annie Proulx story. We’ve seen female-directed Westerns that aren’t rooted in action before; Kelly Reichardt’s diptych of Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow are restrained enough to make this look like The Wild Bunch. What we haven’t seen before is Jane Campion tackling these themes.

That turns out to be enough of a reason to make the film. Anyone who admires the chronicles of repression and its psychic damage that made her name in the ’90s – An Angel at My Table, The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady – will find that The Power of the Dog fits snugly into her ongoing project, despite its unexpected genre. Campion and her brilliant cinematographer Ari Wegner are energised by the challenge of capturing the wildness of the West: the stark, sweeping landscapes, the sometimes violent scenes involving animals. But they are also attentive to the tiniest details, and it’s these that give the story its weight. The show-stopping duel here doesn’t involve guns, it involves a duet of musical instruments that’s loaded with dread, and the film’s pivotal plot point is put across in one wordless shot.

I’m not sure if you could call The Power of the Dog a revisionist Western, if only because there isn’t much of a genre left to revise at the moment. It’s certainly very different from what you might imagine a feminist Western to be. During Campion’s 1990s breakthrough, films like Bad Girls and The Quick and the Dead tried to freshen up the genre’s gender politics with female characters who could out-shoot the boys, but The Power of the Dog‘s main female character is Kirsten Dunst’s helpless, abused alcoholic Rose. What makes this character strong is not her physical strength, but the strength of Dunst’s honest, raw, deeply felt performance, plus the compassion with which Campion observes her place in this society. Rose’s gender may make her an outsider in the macho world of the old West, but the men in Campion’s film are struggling with their social roles too, from Kodi Smit-McPhee’s delicate, sensitive Peter to Jesse Plemons’s tragically decent-hearted George.

The dark star turn, of course, is Benedict Cumberbatch’s Phil, a character so initially repulsive I wondered whether the film could possibly make me care about him. While Phil’s cruelty is never forgiven, it’s cannily explained and contextualised, and this is enough to leaven the often disturbing experience of following his story. In one of the many fascinating, telling moments in the Netflix-produced mini-documentaries included in the extras, Campion admits her first instinct with Phil was to mock him, to lampoon a version of masculinity that she found pointless and destructive. She toned the script down in order to help Cumberbatch find a way into the character, which seems to be in keeping with her general working methods. The documentaries paint a picture of Campion as a deeply collaborative film-maker, more likely to say “Let’s try it!” than “Do it like this”. She describes the script as a starting point, rather than a sacred text; in this way, really, she’s not a very literary film-maker at all.

What word would be better to describe her work? Increasingly I’m starting to think “physical” is the best one, whether that’s the scenes of sex and nudity that attracted so much attention in earlier films like Holy Smoke! or In the Cut, or the rapt, close-up attention paid to ranch work in this film. It’s ironic that a film produced by Netflix, a company who have for better or worse made cinema less physical than it’s ever been, is so besotted with the process of doing things by hand. The distance between Phil and Peter, which seems unbridgeable on their first meeting, is collapsed by the identically tender close-ups we get of them at work. The fact that Phil is making lassos and Peter is making paper flowers becomes irrelevant.

Freed from the tedious acclaim-to-backlash-to-reappraisal cycle that Oscar season inevitably produces, The Power of the Dog already seems like a lasting work, albeit not for all tastes. Another book reference: in his recently published diaries, Alan Rickman notes that the first half of The Piano made him dismiss the film as “a slightly coldly accurate rendition of the script”, then adding “But somehow it kicked in. Holly Hunter was wonderful. They all were. An inspiration.” Nearly thirty years on, and Campion still doesn’t make films that grab you immediately. For those with the patience to ride with them, though, they’re as much of an inspiration as ever.

The Power of the Dog