The Power Of The Dog

March 26, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     As Oscar night fast approaches, our chief regional newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, is busy gushing over Hollywood's yearly output.  Full-page ads and special articles abound in the features section, promoting this movie or that, and using superlatives ordinarily reserved for God alone to describe the accomplishments of the director or various of the actors.

     One in particular that has garnered my attention is, as of this writing, in possession of more nominations than any other movie the industry has deigned to consider one if its own this year.  That movie is called The Power of the Dog.  It was directed by Jane Campion, and stars Kirsten Dunst, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Jesse Plemons.

     I have watched this movie, and for the life of me I can't see what's so great about it, or that it's even mildly great, from the standpoint of acting, directing, writing, editing, or cinematography (in all of which categories, and then some, I think it's been nominated).  Gretchen and I watched the first 25 minutes or so and stopped because we were bored with it.  But later, seeing all the hype and thinking that I might have missed something important, I watched the rest of it.  Then I watched it again, just in case.  Nope, it didn't get any better.  Oh sure, there's a plot, but damn, does it take a long time to unfold, and when it does you still don't quite know what's what.

     First, I should say that I don't think a movie needs to grab you right out of the chute, to borrow a rough tough rodeo term.  I am pleased to let the storyteller begin with a few clearings of the throat, so to speak, in advance of starting off in earnest.  And of course I don't expect the entire plot to be revealed immediately.  Nor do I demand that a movie be absolutely unambiguous.  But I do like to see a tiny bit of action, or whatever passes for action, within the first quarter of the movie.  That didn't happen.  Nor did it happen during the second quarter, or even the third.

     SPOILER ALERT here.  If you haven't seen it, I'll tell you how the story begins, and begin to lay out my several grievances against the movie.  It's 1924, and a couple of brothers own a cattle ranch in a vast expanse of what is supposed to be Montana.  I say "supposed to be" because Jane Campion, the director and writer, who is from New Zealand, chose to film it there, and have New Zealand mountains and plains stand in for those of Montana.  Most people who watch the film probably can't tell the difference--mountains are mountains, right?  But having spent a decent amount of time in Montana myself, I could easily tell the difference.  There's something distinctly volcanic and non-Montana-ish about the topography of New Zealand.  So what? you might ask.  Well, here's what: for all the hoopla the film has garnered about its magnificent scenery, there's very little integration of the story into this grand background.  Almost all the action, if you can call it that, takes place indoors or in comparatively confined areas outside.  The majority of the outdoor parts of the movie could have been filmed in front of a blue screen and a second unit could have been sent to the real Montana to shoot some nice backdrop footage, and no one would have been the wiser.  It's all well and good to use New Zealand as the setting for some completely fictional place like Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings movies, or when the actual story takes place in New Zealand, as in Jane Campion's movie The Piano (another snoozer), but not when there's a surfeit of vast wide open expanse in the very location where the movie is set.

     So, on with the story.  These two brothers, one a chubby would-be gentleman rancher and the other a rough and tumble dirty cowboy (but, curiously, Yale-educated), run this ranch.  The chubby one is played by Jesse Plemons, who in general I like, but who, in this case could have been substituted for by the Pillsbury Doughboy or the blow-up copilot from Airplane! for all the drama he brings to the role.  Advocates of the movie will say, well, he's supposed to be dull and unanimated.  Yes, that's true.  But do you want one of the major characters in any movie to be dull and unanimated?  I can get that for free by looking in the mirror.  And speaking of dull and unanimated, the much-touted Kirsten Dunst is almost equally dull, looking like she's just stepped in out of a rainstorm, with a washed out and unkempt 1920s curly permanent that resembles a worn mop and, I swear, never changes.  She develops a penchant for booze and spends a lot of time in bed or drunk, and occasionally expresses her fear of Phil, her menacing cowboy brother-in-law (oh yeah, she marries the Pillsbury Doughboy, offscreen, and comes to live at the ranch).   She even yells a bit here and there, but ultimately she's a timid rag doll, and not at all interesting to watch.  Nor are she and her real-life partner Jesse Plemons given anything interesting to say.  And the host of ranch hand extras who surround the place have virtually no part in the story other than to grunt and occasionally call someone a name.  They're supposed to be slightly menacing, I think, but they're not.  At all.  

     The remaining two main characters, brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are a little less dull, but just plain weird.  Peter is the Kirsten Dunst character's young adult son, who's studying to be a doctor but spends some time at the ranch on summer vacation.  Reed-thin, and limper than his mother's dishrag hair, he's as true an oddball as there ever was, twirling around, making paper flowers, dissecting rabbits (for medical purposes), and, I shit you not, swaying his hips with a premodern hula hoop.  All this is supposed to convey, I guess, that he's gay, and a gentle and delicate soul, and he gets called names on account of that, which upsets his mom, but doesn't seem to faze him much.  He seems to be fairly comfortable in his own unique skin, and not nearly as weak as mommy thinks he is.  But I think the writer-director tries a bit too hard to make him into a sort of helpless, pining away, closeted soul, which ends up just making him a bizarre and rather insulting stereotype of a certain effeminate type of person.  Still, his real sexual proclivities remain unknown.  All we know is that he loves his mother (though he's aware of and complains to her that she's overprotective) and likes to wear tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots.

     Phil, on the other hand, is truly closeted.  He's constantly praising his long-departed rough-riding cowboy mentor (and naked sleeping bag buddy), Bronco Henry, the secret love of his life, who apparently molded Phil into a butch man's man, in the Greco-Roman style.  Phil rolls his own cigarettes, castrates bulls, and never takes off his chaps and spurs, even indoors, and his crew lays around shirtless (but in chaps) and swims nude.  Guy stuff.  Wait a minute: Bronco Henry?  Why not Bronco Clarence or Bronco Leslie?  Is Jane Campion just trying to make fun of gay people here, or merely of gay stereotypes, or is she simply, as I suspect, clueless?  It's hard to tell, but if she's not trying to parody something (besides herself), then she's really got her head up her ass.

     Anyway, long into the movie, Phil stops making fun of Peter and starts in earnest to groom him into a hard (or at least harder) cowpoke, apparently the way old Bronco Henry did to the young studious Phil so long ago.  He's going to wean the lad off his mother, and make a real man out of him, because that's the kind of man he's attracted to.  As for Peter, maybe he's flattered by Phil's attention, and maybe he's a little tempted to go along, but there's something too off-putting about Phil.  It could be that he stinks, literally, or that that's not the type of relationship Peter wants.  I'm sure he hates the fact that Phil intimidates his mom so much.  In any event, Peter has other ideas, and a plot to hatch, which he does, but in such a slow moving, improbable way, and so late in the game, that we're left with a movie that ends not with a bang but a whimper, consistent at least with the way it has plodded along throughout.

      Like a decennial groundhog, Jane Campion emerges every so often with a movie of dubious quality.  If this film wins big tomorrow night, it will be for one reason, and that is that Campion is a female director and film writer, and it's important to give a female director and film writer an Oscar.  It certainly is, but at what cost, as far as quality is concerned?  Hollywood is hellbent on making amends for its historical sins of exclusion, but can only seem to do it by naked sporadic tokenism.  Two years ago, under pressure to give awards to movies made by nonwhites and non-Europeans, it gave away the entire store to a quirky Korean movie.  A few years before that, under pressure to recognize not only Black film contributions but gayness, it got a twofer by rewarding a movie called Moonlight, about nothing much more than a kid who grows up in bad surroundings, realizes he's gay, gets a handjob on the beach from another guy (in the moonlight, get it?), then goes on to become a lonely drug dealer.  I mean, really, is there nobody in the Academy with any brains?  I guess not.  

     Proponents of The Power of the Dog, or perhaps those who simply want gayness to figure more prominently in the movies (a laudable goal certainly, if it's not done to ridiculously), have suggested that there's a genre called the "gay western" to which this movie belongs.  Well, that's a pretty short list, as far as I know.  The only other one that comes to mind is Brokeback Mountain, and that was more a love story than anything else, and in addition to love it had drama, tension, sadness, and most importantly realism.  The Power of the Dog isn't possessed of any of those things.  It's just a dog of a movie that seems to have become inordinately powerful to the powers that be.  So its name is the only thing about it that works.