96 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
the current cinemaALL IN THE FAMILY
“The Power of the Dog” and “King Richard.”by anthony laneILLUSTRATION BY PATRICK LEGER
T
he new film from Jane Campion,
“The Power of the Dog,” is based
on Thomas Savage’s novel of the same
name, published in 1967. The title echoes
the Twenty-second Psalm, in the King
James Bible: “Deliver my soul from the
sword; my darling from the power of
the dog.” As the movie ends, you can’t
help asking yourself: Who exactly is
the dog, and who’s the darling?
The year is 1925, and the place is Mon-
tana, which is played onscreen by Cam-
pion’s native New Zealand. Whether
it fulfills the role convincingly—not
least in regard to trees and vegetation—
is a question that only Montanans will
be qualified to answer. What’s undeni-
able is the glory of the hills, camel-
colored and weirdly folded, that loom
in the backdrop of the tale. We are in
ranching country, though where w e
are, at any given moment, isn’t always
clear; it takes a while to get one’s bear-
ings, economic as much as geographi-
cal. As Annie Proulx has noted, in an
afterword to Savage’s book, few of us
can understand “the combination of
hard physical work and quiet wealth that
characterized some of the old ranches.”
This is especially true of the Bur-
bank clan. Their bastion is a mansion,
richly furnished, with dark wood pan-
elling, like a gentlemen’s club. But look
at the gentlemen. George Burbank
( Jesse Plemons) is stout, compliant, and
ill at ease; even on horseback, he wears
a black suit. By contrast, his brother,
Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), cuts a
lean and leathery figure and spurns the
trappings of his affluence, preferring
the great outdoors. We learn that he
graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale,
yet refinement of any sort disgusts him;
when the governor of the state comes
to dine, George requests that Phil clean
himself up beforehand. No luck. As
Phil says, “I stink and I like it.”
This rub of the rough against the
smooth—of wilder ways confronting
more cultivated ones—will be familiar
to followers of Campion. Who can for-
get “The Piano” (1993), and the sight of
Holly Hunter, in her bonnet and her
billowing skirt, being borne ashore, amid
a surge of waves, and deposited on the
alien sands of New Zealand? As for ill-matched siblings, they were crucial to
Campion’s début film, “Sweetie” (1989),
whose title character trampled on the
life of her sister. Yet something about
the clashes in “The Power of the Dog”
feels overworked and set up. On a pro-
saic level, I never quite believed in George
and Phil as brothers, and the movie’s
closeups tend to belabor a symbolic point:
artificial flowers, crafted from cut paper;
a hand caressing the curves of a well-
buffed saddle; a bull calf being castrated.
On the page, mind you, Savage describes
the discarded testicles being tossed onto
the fire, where they explode like pop-
corn, so moviegoers get off lightly.
The pivot of the plot is Rose Gor-
don (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who runs
a boarding house. She has a son, an oth-
erworldly creature named Peter (Kodi
Smit-McPhee); as thin as a sapling, and
flitting to and fro in white shoes, he is
the one who makes the flowers. When
the ranchers stop at Rose’s place for a
meal, Phil taunts Peter, to the amuse-
ment of the tough guys, and to Rose’s
evident dismay. George, abashed by his
brother’s bluntness, offers his apologies
to Rose, and that’s not all. Reader, he
marries her! The upshot is that Rose
and Peter move in with George and
Phil. The latter, as you might imagine,
despises the intrusion; he calls Rose “a
cheap schemer” to her face. Campion
now has her principal characters where
she wants them.
And there they stay. Do not be mis-
led by the setting into construing this
movie as a Western. It’s more of a cham-
ber piece with chaps, largely roam-free,
and you soon realize that it ain’t going
anywhere. Rather, it’s sticking around
and digging into the various cruelties
and miseries on display, like a surgeon
exploring a wound. Rose, humiliated by
Phil, and socially out of her depth, takes
to drink, her features increasingly rud-
died by liquor and tears. (It’s a major role
for Dunst, yet so oppressive as almost to
grind her down.) George dwindles from
view. Phil, for reasons that he chooses to
conceal, draws unexpectedly close to
Peter, and takes him out riding. Peter, in
return, has secret ambitions of his own.
One way to measure “The Power of
the Dog” is to lay it beside Elia Kazan’s
“East of Eden” (1955)—another saga of
fraternal rivalry, laden with Biblical over-
Benedict Cumberbatch stars in Jane Campion’s film, set in Montana in 1925. tones. (Kazan’s leading man, James Dean,