The Power of the Dog: What Kind of Man?

Then, suddenly, with one of those abrupt edits that are Campion’s stock-in-trade, we are in another world. A painfully thin teenager, Peter Gordon (Kodi Smit-McPhee), is cutting up the decorative paper from which he makes artificial flower arrangements. We see the scissors before we see a close-up of his face, his large eyes intensely focused on the work of his hands. The room is suffused with soft light, and Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) leans over the son who wants nothing more than her happiness, and praises his creativity. Rose has turned the front room of their house into the town’s only restaurant, and soon the ranch hands, having completed the cattle drive and gotten their rocks off with the local working girls, join Phil and George to eat Mrs. Gordon’s chicken special, served to them by Peter. Phil’s anger at George, for not properly honoring this twenty-fifth anniversary of their first drive, finds a new target in this effeminate boy. “And what pretty lady made these?” asks Phil, as he finger-fucks one of the paper flowers, takes a match to it, and uses it to light his cigarette. In the kitchen, Rose cries, George stays behind to comfort her, and within a few months he has married her and brought her to the ranch, where they move into the primary bedroom, on the other side of the wall from the room where Phil now sleeps alone.

With George turning a blind eye, Phil makes short shrift of Rose, who wilts under his misogynistic sniping. By the time Peter, on vacation from boarding school, arrives at the ranch, Rose is drinking a bottle a day and Phil, having disposed of the mother, turns his wrath on the son. And that is his undoing. Campion specializes in the depiction of wildly dysfunctional families (Sweetie, The Portrait of a Lady, Top of the Lake), but the clash between these two celibate homosexual men—the elder closeted, the younger overtly queer—is by far the most dramatically complicated one that she has ever put on the screen. Determined to “save” his mother, Peter lays a trap for Phil, and slowly lures him into it. The layering of fear, desire, loathing, admiration that leaks into their body language and glances is riveting.

In Savage’s novel, there is a mention of how the cowhands loved watching westerns and ordered clothes from the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog to make themselves look like movie cowboys. But Savage notes that Phil never went to the movies. In Campion’s film, Peter finds Phil’s secret hideaway, the place where he keeps a box of Physical Culture magazines that belonged to Bronco Henry. On the cover of one from 1900 is the slug “Weakness Is a Crime. Don’t Be a Criminal.” Inside are photos of bodybuilders in suggestive poses, naked except for the fake fig leaves shielding their genitals. Perhaps that’s why Peter’s fake flowers rubbed Phil the wrong way. Campion never shows us an image of Bronco Henry, just the fetish objects that Phil has held on to: a scarf, a saddle, the magazines. According to Phil, Bronco Henry taught him everything about ranching. Although it’s never said, the only way Phil could keep this man he idolized and desired with him was to incorporate Bronco Henry’s image into his own: the image that Bronco Henry took from magazines that were mailed in plain brown wrappers, the image of men who believe that weakness is a crime, so of course they can’t be “nancy boys” like Peter—even though they know they are.

Campion is a great director of actors, and in The Power of the Dog, her work with the quartet of brilliant performers at its center is wonderfully supported by cinematographer Ari Wegner, who shapes meaning with light, and editor Peter Sciberras, who stretches out moments in which nothing seems to be happening until they become revelations. And while Smit-McPhee’s Peter is almost unreadable from beginning to end—which is a difficult task for an actor to pull off—the film could not exist without Cumberbatch’s extraordinary Phil, in whom volcanic rage and regressive separation anxiety keep breaking through an awkward, often desperate masquerade of übermasculinity. The Power of the Dog won major prizes and was praised by critics and audiences alike. Campion took home a Best Director Oscar, and Cumberbatch racked up a good number of Best Actor awards. But the film and particularly Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Phil were also criticized, by a vociferous minority, for a lack of realism. To which I can only ask, Compared with what? With such exemplary westerns as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch or John Ford’s The Searchers or Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar or Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven? Are the performances in those films any more realist than Cumberbatch’s in The Power of the Dog? Not at all. What is different is the character Cumberbatch plays. Unlike the male characters in those westerns, who never question their own masculinity, Phil needs to exaggerate his masculinity in order to camouflage his homoerotic desire.

To the question Peter poses at the beginning of the film about what defines a man, his own answer is sociopathic, while Phil has no answer at all. There has never before been a western or a revisionist western with characters such as these, and that includes recent examples of the genre that take homoeroticism and homophobia as their subjects. There are elements here that we associate with westerns: the magnificent Montana vistas (or rather, New Zealand neatly substituted for Montana); a cattle ranch and prosperous ranch owners; hardworking ranch hands; disenfranchised Native Americans; and so forth. But the film has neither a hero nor a villain, no black hats or white hats, just three men and a woman, hopelessly twisted by the ideology of patriarchy, the power of the dog.