The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021) (Patreon)

Magnificently directed, beautifully acted, and driven by a score by Johnny Greenwood that thuds when you expect to lilt and vice versa, The Power of the Dog is very close to a masterpiece. But unlike so many great films that grab you by the collar and shove you in the direction of their greatness, The Power of the Dog creeps up on you. It's a film that actually uses time as its medium, gently rotating like a prism, revealing new facets over and over again. (Needless to say, it will not feature in this year's Oscar race in any significant way. It's far too subtle for that.)

Based on Thomas Savage's novel, Campion's film is almost Sirkian in its sweep. It brings us to the relative isolation of Montana in the 1920s, as the Old West is dying away, the frontier now closed, with wealth becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Two of those seemingly fortunate souls are the Burbank brothers, classic cowboy / hard man Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his prim, quieter older brother George (Jesse Plemons). They've made a bit of money as ranchers, but only George deigns to act the part. Phil refuses to let go of his rugged persona, so much so that he takes offense when George kindly asks him to wash up before they have dinner with the governor (Keith Carradine). Cumberbatch, awkwardly channeling Kurt Russell, plays Phil with an indeterminacy, so we can't ever know to what extent his machismo is genuine or just a well-honed act.

Trouble brews when George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a poor widow with a sullen teenage son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil immediately distrusts Rose, well past the point of reason, and an astute viewer might surmise that Phil simply has a problem with women, or with George's capacity to follow a conventional path that is not available to him. As Phil and the other cowhands mercilessly harass Peter for failing to embody their brand of masculinity, we notice that, again, there is something crueler and more pointed about Phil's verbal abuse.

One of the things that makes The Power of the Dog so impressive is how it displays irrational behavior as natural or even expected, only to reveal more facts about its characters, insights that bring their behaviors in line with reality. Rose seems benign, for example, and Phil's humiliation of her seems outrageous. But then we learn more about her, and while it isn't suggested that Phil is right to torment her, he wasn't entirely wrong, either. It becomes Phil's mission to take Peter under his wing, to prevent Rose from passing her damage along to her son.

There is something about The Power of the Dog that resembles Sirk's Written on the Wind. The "natural" connections between father and son, or the simple act of exogamous coupling, are distorted by paranoia and thwarted desire, and Campion suggests that these mental crises are written upon the land, serving as the seeds of a fractured modernity. So many long shots of the big sky country are marred by the presence of men on the horizon, and in this regard there's also a bit of There Will Be Blood in The Power of the Dog. As a family business expands, and takes possession of the last available parcels of the West, these self-made men become infected by forces they cannot control. Capitalism is a psychological perversion, and as such it warps our relationships to the world around us, and to ourselves.