It Came From Streaming: The Power of the Dog (Dir Jane Campion, 2h 6m, 2021)

 

Whither the Western? I've asked this question before, under the auspices of its last truly great outing under its last truly great direction, Once Upon a Time in the West, but it bears repeating-is the Western truly dead, or has it simply, as cowboys did at the end of the 19th Century, had to look for another way to make a livelihood? Almost since its "death" in the early 1970s, the Revisionist, the Neo, and the Weird Western has cetainly taken its shape, from Brokeback Mountain, that highlights the queer subtext of a macho and defemininized way of life against the back of a familiar period, to wild-eyed reintepretations of the archetypical Western transplanted to 19th century Japan in Sukiyaki Western Django, to films that honour the spirit, if not the period or the visual iconography of the subgenre, such as A Girl Walks Home at Night, a vampire Spaghetti Western set in Iran, and Logan, which reframes the X-Man, Wolverine, as a tired, battle-worn and ailing fighter on one last job to protect a young mutant.

But whisper it, with a clicking of spurs and a jingle of stirrups, the Western may be riding back from an empty grave. Arguably, in a Hollywood that's been saturated by heroes every bit as untroubled by nuance on the whole as the heyday of the Western's white-hatted heroes and black-hatted villains, it's been trying to make a resurgence for a while, its fingers clawing itself free from the gravesoil. Them Coen Brothers have a lot to do with the return of the Western-from the neo-western No Country for Old Men onwards, via the superb remake of True Grit, to the recent anthology film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, each capturing the spirit, charm, and at points utter desolation of the genre, not to mention Tarantino's masterful carrying forward of the genre at its most bloodthirsty and Peckinparish, or the superb techno-Western, Westworld. There have, undoubtedly been years where the Western has hung, almost about to return to the mainstream, but every time, the trend fizzles out.

That was, until last year. Alongside the eleagic Old Henry, what may be Clint Eastwood's final time in the saddle in Cry Macho, and the Idris Elba-starring 1-2 punch of Concrete Cowboy and the excellent, and timely revisionist The Harder they Fall, comes arguably the peak of 2021's Westerns, in the form of Jane Campion's psychological western, The Power of the Dog, in which Benedict Cumberbatch's tough, man-of-the-soil rancher, a character portrait that at once critiques, explores, and utterly deconstructs masculinity in the Western, terrorises the family of his brother, including his wife's sheltered son, until his own past begins to be uncovered as the old world of the West, and the new age of modernity collide, with unexpected, and ultimately tragic results.

Beginning with the roundup itself, and quickly introducing us to both of the brothers, and their very different ethoses-Phil is domineering, often cruel, but innately connected to the land, seemingly able to see things other, lesser men cannot see in it, whilst George is a sweet, kind, and more sheltered figure. The two of them and their team of cowboys overnight in the inn belonging to Kirsten Dunst's Rose, where Phil and his uncouth workers tease and torment her frail and bookish son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) before George falls in love and quickly marries Rose, bringing both mother and son back to the ranch, only for Phil's cruelty and malice to step up as he belittles Rose, who he believes is after his brother's money.

This is, undeniably, Cumberbatch's film; I've rather (unfairly) regarded Benedict Cumberbatch, in the few times this column and he have crossed paths, as the archetypal English character actor, much in the same way that Eddie Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston have become-innately capable of carrying a small drama on their own, or as being a bit-part player in bigger pictures, with his real talents lying on the small screen rather than the silver. The Power of the Dog is, thus, something of a revelation-whilst Cumberbatch has played anti-heroic characters before, and indeed outright villains (the brother of Whitey Bulger in the underrated Black Mass for one, and the cool menace of Khan in the otherwise derivative Star Trek Into Darkness), Phil may be Cumberbatch entering a new era of his career in a single stroke. Enter Benedict Cumberbatch, method actor.

Phil is that great Western schism writ large, a one-man conversation between the well-educated college boy that he is eventually, unexpectedly, found out to be, and a grubby (Cumberbatch did not wash throughout most of the film, and ended up giving himself nicotine poisoning on multiple occasions) cowboy, utterly in tune with the natural environment. He is a cruel, often malicious figure; one of the first scenes that he shares with Dunst has her practically break down as he, off-screen, utterly outplays her on the banjo, something that begins her descent into depression and alcoholism in a scene that's only made the tenser by the way that Campion's cinematographer,Ari Wegner, shoots it like a physical confrontation, that paranoia, that control that Phil has over Rose and Peter, and even George, leaching and leaking into Johnny Greenwood's score, the banjo-style plucked cello, the atonal brass, the language of Morricone turned sour and cruel.

And yet, for all this malice and torment meted out by Phil-and much of the film once Rose and Peter arrive at the ranch are vignettes of other people's treatment, even Phil's own parents, by their often aloof and callous son, even as they worry for his welfare-The Power of the Dog is a film just as centered on beauty and sorrow and loss. Wegner's cinematography at points is almost effortlessly evocative-the film returns to the opening of the barn that dominates the ranch myriad times, from one of Cumberbatch's outbursts, in which he takes his anger out on a horse, to framing a motorcar as it prepares to snake across the landscape in Wegner's eleagic aerial sequences, to framing Phil and Peter as the duo become closer. The landscape is, much as it seems hackeyned to say for a genre that practically exemplified this concept, a character of its own, a stark, often forbidding reflection of its central figure and Wegner and Campion are as dedicated to making it such as any of the West's great directors.

 This beauty, though, is lost for its hero-Phil, for much of the film's first half, is as much a puzzle as he is a man-his parents and brother puzzle over what could have made a well-educated man essentially turn native, only to reveal it in moments that as tender as they are melacholic, with Phil at once tormented by the loss of his mentor, and later revealed to be lover, Bronco Henry and pained by his adoption of the cowboy lifestyle, even as it fades into the setting sun, and the 20th century hurries it off into memory and myth, at once memorial of the skills his lover taught him, and a coping mechanism against the dying of that very age, even as he tries to carry both on with Peter. That a western, of all genres, carries such a starkly rendered story of queer relationships (the great antithesis to 2005's Brokeback Mountain, whose novel was influenced by The Power of the Dog's author in the 1960s), is arguably the drive behind this film.

The Western has, after all, felt like the last bastion of the heterosexual white man for many years; and yet, it openly seems surprising so, despite the oddly bigoted, and rather tiresome opinions of Sam Elliot. The western is an innately macho genre, in which loneliness, and being the outsider go hand-in-hand, hardly new experiences for a queer individual in any walk of life, let alone rural America, whilst, despite Mr Elliot's complaints that gay people did not exist in the Old West and that the original novel didn't have a homosexual subtext-news to Thomas Savage, who was himself bisexual, and the countless queer people who worked, lived, and loved in this era. One can only hope, as Brokeback Mountain did before it, that this film opens new dialogues about queer identies in this foundational era of American life.

Yet, The Power of the Dog's true requiem is not for the absent Bronco Henry, or the lost love of its central figure that drives him on in his lifestyle, but for the era he represents. Against him is the logical, the scientific, the seemingly guileless Peter, who essentially turns everything the older man comes to teach him about the craft of being a cowboy against Phil. Smit-McPhee at once gives Peter an uncomfortable, almost clinical approach-we see him dote on his struggling mother with a rabbit, only to kill and dissect it, and an innate charm, Wegner often shooting him in the same closeups as the film affords Phil, but where the older man is a being of murk, there's cleanness and openness to the shots of the younger man.

In much the same way as There Will Be Blood's central struggle between faith and power is personified by the older, experienced Plainview, a veritably Biblical figure, entrenched and sure of themselves, and the young ambition of Eli, so the positively elemental struggle between the old ways and the new are represented, up till the film's gripping denoument, in which the West-as-Phil, this cruel and yet innately fragile figure, is bested and perishes from their own undoing, by these two generations of men, leading to a final shot that is as chilling as it is fitting.

Is the Western back, thus, in a film that deals ultimately with the ending of that era? Perhaps it's fitting that it does, if indeed 2021 is the start, as Hollywood casts about for something to franchise or explore as an antidote to the superhero hegemony. Perhaps we are in need of heroes of a bygone age to remind us why we enjoy their modern successors so much. Perhaps last year was just a once-off. Whether it is the beginning of a new trend, the start of a conversation about this era and its people, or whether it's simply a superbly told film, The Power of the Dog is not just a superbly shot and told tale of the end of the Western lifestyle and the slow decay of masculinity through the eyes of Benedict Cumberbatch's rancher as he mocks his brother's wife and son, but a tautly told tale of revenge, male solitude and the land.

Rating: Highly Recommended

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