The Power of the Dog

THE POWER OF THE DOG   ***

Jane Campion

2021

IDEA:  While waging a war of attrition against his new sister-in-law, an irascible Montana rancher is pulled into the orbit of her enigmatic teen son.

BLURB:  The Power of the Dog is a queer kind of Western, in all senses of the word. Structurally, it morphs from the appearance of a sweeping frontier drama to the cloistered, febrile textures of a Gothic romance. Standing in for 1920s Montana, the desolate, alien-looking New Zealand landscape never lets us settle into a terrain that feels particularly isomorphic with the American plains. Guns rarely appear, and outward displays of violence are scarce or elided. Campion’s violence is predominantly psychological, festering beneath the surface on a constant simmer. Most of the film’s incident transpires in pained, loaded glances and gestures, in the codes of patriarchy and cowboy masculinity being tacitly challenged, inverted, or otherwise nervously negotiated. The Power of the Dog is queer, of course, because it deals with queer characters, most intriguingly Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Peter, whose gawky string-bean frame and effete manner alone make him a full-bodied iconographic shock to the milieu of gruff machismo in which he's cultivating his identity. The Oedipal drama that unfolds between him, his mother, and the literally castrating father figure-cum-lover Phil forms the late-breaking crux of the somewhat shaky narrative, giving the film its most tantalizingly subversive thematic currents. What nags about The Power of the Dog, a curious problem considering the director, is that it often feels too reserved to truly bring its psychosexual tensions alive; one longs for some spikes of libidinal energy in the languorous mood, for a more viscous, lurid visual eroticism to convince us of the characters’ transgressive desires. It’s all guarded under those circumspect gazes, nudging the film softly rather than emphatically toward the queerness that becomes its unexpected victor.