George may not be spoiling for a fight in the same way that Phil is, but the symbolic fracture between the brothers is undeniable: George desires domesticity, moving grand pianos into the house and hosting dinner parties with politicians, while Phil craves eternal wilderness-the kind of world he can prove his own toughness in. He castrates bulls by hand, binds twine together to make his own ropes, and rarely bathes whenever he’s inside the drafty mansion his brother has constructed, he feels out of place, like some grimy poltergeist disrupting George’s facade of civility. He constantly invokes a now-dead mentor named Bronco Henry who taught him how to survive on the frontier and lashes out at anyone else who dares to try to forge a connection with him. Phil sees himself as the ultimate cowboy. But Phil, played magnificently by Cumberbatch in a role that’s completely against type, is the furious engine of the film’s heartbreak. Each member of her wounded foursome reflects a different aspect of the tainted promise of the West. In The Power of the Dog, Campion embraces the genre’s many possibilities. Westerns almost always wrestle with masculinity in some way, whether through a simple yarn about heroes and villains in the open country, or through a darker reckoning with Americans’ desire to conquer land that is not their own. Read: Escape from quarantine with a Western movie George marries Rose, seeing the newcomers as the beginning of a real family, but Phil derides them as too weak for life on the range. Into this dynamic wanders local widow Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). There, Phil has proudly carved out a lonely existence for himself as a cattle herder, while his full-hearted brother, George (Jesse Plemons), is dissatisfied with their spartan life and seeking companionship. But I didn’t realize what a frightening character he was going to be until Phil retired to his bed, pulled out a banjo, and started angrily plucking at it that humble string instrument hasn’t been played so malevolently on-screen since the notorious “ dueling banjos” of Deliverance.Ĭampion’s first feature film in 12 years, based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Savage, is set on a 1925 Montana ranch that’s surrounded by spiky mountains and acres of barren landscape filled with both promise and hostility.
The swaggering rancher Phil Burbank (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) at the center of Jane Campion’s new film is introduced as a thin-skinned bully who’s quick to insult those around him. The banjo may seem like an innocent instrument, but in The Power of the Dog, it’s downright menacing.
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