This year I finally sat down with a film that I initially had no interest in, that I understand made a big splash in the awards circuit and had audiences debating it’s true purpose, breaking down plot points and characters to their core components. I had a strong reaction on my first viewing and understood both the hype and the frustration, I also needed to know more and decided to watch it again to truly mentally digest the experience and I’m happy to say I absolutely love that film. The fact that it is so unassuming and intimate, that the stakes are exclusively about family and the strange dynamics that exist between it’s members was a terrific break from the summer blockbuster formula, the end of the world drama that weighs down the completely human experience of just watching ordinary people in other walks of life negotiate challenge. I mean, I guess ordinary is a bit of a stretch because most of the people I’m talking about have magic powers and the film I’m loving all over is Encanto. The other film I watched was The Power of the Dog, which I didn’t like at all. Not one bit.
This is not to suggest that The Power of the Dog is a bad film. It’s not. It’s got all the things I want from my Oscar bait: good acting, cinematography, dramatic actors acting dramatically, impeccable set design, and A-List actors swinging for the fences with their acting powers. And if that seems snide it’s because it absolutely is. What it doesn’t have, to my mind, is a purpose. Throughout I was struggling to understand what kind of story it was trying to be, it hints at being a romance, then it seems like Jesse Plemons character is going to finally stand up to his brother but that doesn’t happen, then it seems like Benedict Cumberbatch might evolve or that Kirsten Dunst might overcome her bullying, then nope. Then the film ends. There’s something admirable about this ability to tease the viewer, to sort of sidestep expectations and flirt with so many different genres. There’s also something infuriating about it.
Is The Power of the Dog a western or is it noir? Answer: yes. And that’s where the film escapes me in it’s contradictory nature. In a western there’s some fundamental evil or purpose, either an outright villain in a lawless environment or the environment itself, manifest from the myth and legends of the American Frontier that is rife with conflict and existential violence. It’s the mundane called to greater purpose, to bring order to the intransigent wild, and it’s popularity comes from it’s extensive documentation and by the marriage of relatively modern technology meeting the primordial. Noir is, as the late, great Roger Ebert described it, the absence of heroes, to wit, stories in this genre are about bad guys matching wits with worse guys, usually in some attempt at redemption, often failing. The Power of the Dog has all the pieces of either genre and commits to neither. This may be the point. Rather than exist as a genre trope it seems content to exist as a sort of slice out of time, like a few obituary lines out of an archival newspaper from a forgotten, dead town brought to life in vivid, intimate detail; an artifact affected with context.
That’s a cool idea but before I start to like the thing, let’s get some major complaints out of the way. I like Benedict Cumberbatch for any number of projects and he’s, as expected, really good in this, however, while he is exceptional as a vicious, cold blooded asshole he is not convincing as a bully and I say this with the relative confidence that I could beat the guy up, no problem. Maybe it’s the name, maybe it’s his delicate features or the effete accent, but if this dude pulled half the shit he does in this film, not even contextualizing the old west, Phil Burbank, in either genre, would get tuned up like an old Chevy. I appreciate what he’s going for and the way that the character is written, but there’s an absolute lack of menace to the character. Take a Russell Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma or a, god rest him, Powers Booth in Tombstone or Deadwood, these guys were threatening without doing anything at all. They just walked into a room and there was that sense of dread that something bad was about to happen. That is not here and the film, as I grouse about it, lives or dies on the ability of Cumberbatch to not only be vile but a real threat, and although I understand that there’s a kind of battle of wits taking place, that his character’s pathos is hinted at, it only succeeded at making me dislike everyone.
One final complaint and I’ll wrap it up. The Power of the Dog is set in Montana in 1925. This was a minor pet peeve that graduated into something I’m genuinely infuriated about, that got worse as the film progressed and it’s an odd thing to get pissed about but I’ll die on this hill and you can’t stop me. Montana, where my grandfather was born and, 71 years later, died, where I visited him a couple of times driving through the winter in my POS Geo Prizm like an idiot, is fucking gorgeous. It is green and sprawling, the mountains are massive and snowy, it is lush and ancient and breathtakingly beautiful. I almost hit a bald eagle with my car on the way to Helena one time, it’s cartoonishly cinematic. But Jane Campion, the director who is from New Zealand, opted to film there instead and, while I know beauty is subjective, I could not arrest my eyes from how desolate and barren the setting is, despite the admittedly majestic mountains. The whole film itself is actually guilty of something those mountains can’t help, it’s so goddamn brown and arid. It feels like a desert that no rational person would want to occupy but I definitely appreciate seeing new landscapes and environments but, to make my point, watch one of the most boring movies of all time A River Runs Through It, watch that film as long as you can before slipping into a coma and you’ll get an idea of what I’m whining about.
So, watch The Power of the Dog, make a pretentious ass out of me, I welcome it because if there is some insight into it I’m missing, all the better. In fact, I’ve been wrong about a lot of films, I used to hate No Country for Old Men for its nihilism and anticlimactic jerkiness but now I compulsively watch it once a year. And I actually love Jane Campion for Top of the Lake, the first season is an absolutely immaculate whodunnit that both hypnotized and rocked me in it’s finale. I’m just sad that I’m missing out here, I do not get it, with all the weapons and tools at her disposal I’m left wanting. Wanting to talk about Bruno.
Brave It All Alone 