The Power of the Dog
March 28, 2022
By NZB3
Because The Power of the Dog (2021) is misunderstood and the publicity persistent (who is paying for all this media attention right now?) and because I’ve now seen the film a review is in order. Like other Jane Campion films I’ve seen such as Holy Smoke, And Angel at my Table, The Piano, this is a long drawn-out tense and suffering movie.
Campion is to drama what Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David are to comedy. Seinfeld, and especially Curb Your Entusiasm, are comedies of awekwardness: Healthy boundaries are not set, tension arises, cathartic and comedic release occurs. Campion’s film making, however, deprives the viewer of any catharsis or amusement or release. Instead, her characters compound misunderstandings until violence and abuse errupts through pretenses of civility. Eg. Sam Neill’s character chops off Holly Hunter’s character’s finger. Eg. Harvey Keitel the professional cult de-programmer becomes a corrupt letcher.
Jane Campion is the leader of such dark and messed up films that New Zealand movie makers have been producing for the past 40 years or so. Only Taika Waititi has bucked this trend by introducing some colour and warmth, nostalgia and heart, into Kiwi film. Part of Campion’s trip that she leads her State-funded industry on tends also to involve isolated women at the mercy of men without oversite. Keitel takes Kate Winslet into isolation, Sam Neill takes Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin up a New Zealand River, and Janet Frame is trapped in her own biography by a sort of Truman Show Concentration Camp called post-war New Zealand. The Power of The Dog is set in a 1920s Montanna where, as in space, as in other Campion movies, nobody can hear you scream.
What the Public Think of Phil
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Phil, the titular Dog. He’s a rough and rude rancher who has earned his success but elects not to enjoy it; Still roughing it as in the days of the ranch’s start-up. Phil and his brother, Fatso, have come up together from nothing in 1900 to wealth in 1925. Fatso seems to lack all the skills Phil has when it comes to handling men and cattle but apparently handles the financial side of the business. At some point he has become fat and refined with his suit and baths and motorcar and social connections.
Fatso, off camera, marries flakey widow Kirsten Dunst and her sociopathic son. A very brief honeymoon scene tells the audience to think the couple is happy and sociopath kid can now afford to attend medical school so everything’s just great. Dunst even gets to hang out with the governor of the state, Montanna, and is gifted her own expensive piano to entertain with. She’ll never have to work again. Happy families!
Phil the Cowboy, so the story goes, sets out to ruin the happy new family by terrorising it like a mad dog. He lives in their house, crashes their dinner parties, will not wash, mocks the son, and perpetually spooks Dunst so that she is prevented from settling in. He hits horses, deprives Indians of resources, yells, sneers, and commits arson on works of art (sociopath kid’s paper flowers.)
The mainstream idiot audience, at Jane Campion’s incitement, thinks that Phil is a son of a bitch and it’s a great injustice that he should exert so much cruel power. In a just world some benign government Nanny State would send a ‘dog catcher’ to apprehend this powerful dog, Phil, and lock him up or gun him down. Ah, but Jane Campion has of course, once again, set things up so that it’s a time and place where there is nobody to rescue poor Holly/Anna/Kate/Janet et al from the big bad men in these bad old days. Patriarchical scumbags dispense the pianos around here and what can a poor woman and her weedy weirdo kid do about it?
Unlike Anna Paquin in the piano, Dunst’s tormented spawn did have a plan to rescue mother from the mad dog: Poison. Phil is taken into the sociopath’s confidence and opportunistically murdered like a euthanised dog and everybody lives happily ever after. The end. Give Jane Campion an Oscar. Down with toxic masculinity etc. etc.
In Defense of Phil Burbank
The true hero of this film is Cumberbatch’s character, Phil, and he is picked apart in a process resembling vivisection. In a harsh land he found his stride and is eternally grateful to the mentor who taught him with his brother how to do it- Bronco Henry. However, patterning onto this role model came at a cost which was Phil’s sensitivity. Rustic Montanna never offered Phil a path to develop his deeper empathy for people and culture and it has been stunted.
His Montanna is a world of riding the trail, avoiding anthrax, long rides, and cattle: don’t try to understand ’em just rope rope and throw and brand ’em. The hard men suited to this hard life allows for a bit of banjo musical expression and perhaps some fart jokes about eating beans or greenhorns who can’t ride horses well and that’s about it. Certaily some hero-worship toward long gone old Bronco. Simple tastes, hard work, drinking, working-class masculinity, and scorn for weakness are what makes the 1900-1925 Montanna venture a success.
Phil tries to connect with his brother but is constantly rebuked. After 25 years and this latest cattle drive there’s something to celebrate together, Phil says, and he wont entertain doing that without his brother. Fatso is cold, doesn’t want the toast to family or Bronco. Phil wants them to celebrate together by going on a buddy camp as of old by hunting elk and frying up the liver the way they learned as kids. Fatso wont even reply to Phil’s attempt to connect.
Worse, Fatso suddenly announces that he has been married to the flakey hospitality workers the crew recently met. Phil’s council and approval are never consulted, let alone his being invited to the wedding or treated as part of the family. Phil gets frozen out in his own home by the interlopers without being given any chance to adjust and accept a situation that presents a huge emotional learning curve for everyone.
For her part, Dunst’s character is completely thrown in the deep end by Fatso’s scheming. She has gone from a frenetic hospitality worker trying to survive to a kept woman with an estate, staff, fine clothing, and dinners with high society. Fatso expects her to musically and socially climb this huge gulf as if it does not exist. Instead, she’s more at home trying to be one of the kitchenhands or becoming a messy alcoholic neurotic. Fatso is let completely off the hook for engineering all of this even by Phil who resents Dunst and is himself blamed for her trainwreck.
Phil does have a sensitive side that has no role model, no vechicle, and which he doesn’t know what to do with. In private he has a hidden water hole where he bathes alone and keeps magazines about Physical Culture which was a great craze of that era similar to the bodybuilding mania of the 1980s. Phil doesn’t know how to grow this side of him and integrate it with his role as owner-manager. The kind of 3D man he is doesn’t fit the 2D persona Bronco modeled for him or the 1D dogs who work the ranch.
When Sociopath Kid finds Phil’s sanctuary and keeps his secret it opens up a path for Phil to grow and connect. Turns out that making rope is, to Phil, a similar personal outlet to Sociopath’s paper flowers. Fatso wanted to grow out of being a rude cowboy dog into something greater too. However, he didn’t want to grow as a person but grow as an image to others. And, he didn’t cultivate the growth but simply shove Phil and everyone else around like dollhouse dolls with no will or preferences of their own. Phil’s seeking of personal development is authentic and easy to empathise with thanks for Cumberbatch’s fine performance. He wants to be more, he’s strong enough to be vulnerable and authentic.
Well, we can’t have that!
Sociopath kid is quite sure that Phil is no more than the dog whose power over his mother is hurting her. Jane Campion, like the mainstream audience, accept this basic view that there is a ‘David vs. Golliath’ battle going on here. It’s vigilante revenge against the man who is mean to a woman as justified by the lack of government policemen or Social Development agents in the setting Campion has, once more, selected.
Phil’s empathetic journey is simply an opportunity for Sociopath Kid to get in close and kill him. As we have seen, the Sociopath Kid turns from patting rabbits to breaking their necks and dispassionately dissecting their insides. Dunst violates something Phil loves, his collection of hides, by giving them away to passing Indians. Phil was going to make rope from the best parts of the hide and burn the rest which seems economically inefficient but a ritual and choice to make and one he was deeply invested in. Nobody gets that about him except for Sociopath Kid who happens to have some pre-prepared anthrax-poisoned hide to offer as replacement. Phil feels seen by someone in this world and accepts this great gift of connection. He’s also impressed that Sociopath Kid can see abstracts in the landscape as he can, as Bronco could, as few others can do: A laughing dog rather than just a range of hills. There is a shot here for a happy ending, some growth that can lead all the fused people out of their stolid messed up turn-of-the-century passionless existence.
At least, Cumberbatch was working for that in his acting but his director was not. Jane Campion slams that door shut in our faces. Phil’s cut hand quickly absorbs the antrax-tainted hide and his journey is over; Dead “dog.” The growing human heart, the only one in the movie, has been snuffed out. The hero has been killed in a most evil way.
The family that is really a doll house will now, we are to think, be just fine now happily ever after now the dog is put down. The crime is justified because, after all, didn’t we see Phil hit a horse earlier and splash toxic masculinity around during a droving run? Neurotic women don’t need to heal they just need avoidance and booze until a man blamed for their problems can be murdered in a perfect crime! We are supposed to think, now, that a good or at least best possible outcome has been achieved. Jane Campion’s moral lesson, once again, is to blame a guy and expose the guy and eliminate a guy.
So that was The Power of The Dog. That’s what everyone is going on about at the moment once again. A movie deep enough that few will endure watching it let alone processing what they have seen. They will settle on the facile interpretation that Bad Man Phil got just deserts because everyone say so while unconsciously feeling a bit awkward about it. This awkwardness is because, subconsciously, we know Phil wasn’t bad at all but this will be put down to amazing acting showing how sympathetic evil patriarchical dog men can appear. At the end of the day we have been tricked into hating men and praising evil laregly by the plot device of slow drawn-out film making that makes perception an act of defying boredom. Dame Jane once again is a smuggler of horrible moral ideas under a cloak of boreing her audience and a misandrist artist funded in the millions by New Zealand On Air and viewers like you.
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