Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog could also be called The Power of Benedict Cumberbatch, as he’s so spectacular. He plays a ruggedly masculine cowboy with an inner life that isn’t written, but that we somehow still see. It is also clearly Campion’s best film since The Piano or my own favourite, An Angel at My Table (as for Bright Star, we said we’d never talk of it again — why did you even bring it up? We all have our off days).
If Cumberbatch doesn’t win every award going, I’ll eat my hat, but probably not his ten-gallon one
The film is based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage that was praised to the skies when published but sold very few copies, unfathomably. (Same with John Williams’s Stoner.) Set in Montana in 1925, it’s about two brothers, Phil (Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), who own and run a cattle ranch. They are polar opposites. Phil is brilliantly clever, but mean-spirited and cruel, and so ruggedly masculine he can castrate a bull with his bare hands. (The book was optioned once with Paul Newman cast as Phil but, apparently, he didn’t have the hands for it. Too small.) Meanwhile, George is slower, softer, kinder, stockier. (Phil calls him ‘fatso’.)
The pair grew up on the ranch and have shared a bedroom since childhood, but along comes a divisive force in the form of Rose (Kirsten Dunst), the widow who runs the local boarding house. George marries her and she comes to live at their ranch with her son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is studying to be a doctor and makes paper flowers and is delicate and not ruggedly masculine in any way whatsoever. A ‘sissy’, declares Phil, who burns the flowers with his big old castrating hands.
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