A Dog Eat Dog World

FLC001, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Film Review of The Power of the Dog

By Geoff Carter

Chronicling the inner world of fictional characters is part and parcel of literature. Since the days of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and the modernistic stylings of Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, novelists have sought to explain the foibles of human character through action, reaction, description, and inner monologues, and stream-of-consciousness. The novelist, can, by delving directly into the thoughts of her characters, offer the reader a glimpse into their inner lives. Narrative film, however, is a medium of the external. It cannot directly convey the thoughts, feelings, or sensibilities of characters. These must be communicated through the external, their façades and traits, their habits, and quirks. 

Movies like Florian Zeller’s Father stretch the envelope of how film portrays the subjective life of its characters, in this case projecting the disoriented reality of an Alzheimer’s victim Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) directly onto the screen. Places, times, and characters in this film meld into each other in unexpected and frightening ways. It is not until partway through the film that the viewer realizes he has been riding a reality roller coaster indelibly laced with the memories and fantasies of its main character. The audience, like the protagonist, is forced to share his bewilderment and disorientation of a shredded reality. It is an ingenious technique to transport the viewer directly into the protagonist’s experience.

In The Power of the Dog, director Jane Campion untangles the inner lives of her characters not through replicating their inner psychological processes through external cinematic technique, but by deliberately unmasking the concrete results of their desires by employing a unique visual vocabulary. This film, and much of Campion’s other work (including The Piano and In the Cut), have an eerily dreamlike quality. Her lush, layered and sometimes enigmatic imagery seems to display the significance of recurring motifs found in dreams. In The Power of the Dog, rabbits—or rabbit parts—keep popping up surprisingly, as they would in a dream; the significance of that image could be representative of innocence, helplessness, or prey. Or of survival.

The protagonist of the film is the hypermasculine rancher Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose phlegmatic brother (Jesse Plemons), meets and marries the sensitive Rose (Kirsten Dunst). Her gangly and seemingly effeminate son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a medical student, is mocked and scorned by the macho Phil, whose enmity also includes his new sister-in-law. Phil, in fact, is abrasive towards Peter, Rose, the governor, and even—to a lesser degree—his own brother. 

In fact, Phil’s lone friend seemed to have been Bronco Henry, a mentor who has been mythologized and deified by Phil, who has gone to the extreme of building a shrine for his deceased paragon of the cowboy way of life. As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that Bronco Henry was more than just a friend and mentor to Phil. 

When George marries Rose and returns with her to family ranch, Phil insults and reviles her, stating that she only married his brother for their money. After Peter goes to attend medical school, Rose, suffering from Phil’s abuse, begins to drink heavily, eventually becoming an alcoholic. When Peter returns, Phil, and the rest of the crew, mock his clumsiness and ineptitude mercilessly. 

After Peter happens to see Phil bathing in a creek—and abusing himself while fondling one of Bronco Henry’s old handkerchiefs, the rancher suddenly, and almost unaccountably, becomes friendly with the boy. Phil starts teaching Peter the ways of a cowboy and is at times surprised by Peter’s toughness. At one point, the boy snaps the neck of an injured rabbit. While Phil is surprised at this, the viewer has previously seen Peter dissecting a rabbit in his room—not an act of malevolence or mercy, but one of scientific curiosity. 

When Peter is shown stripping the hide off a cow infected with anthrax, the viewer can only guess at his intentions. While Phil’s inner life, reflected in his masculine histrionics and general histrionics, is eventually revealed to be a result of his own homophobia and self-loathing, Peter’s motives remain much more cryptic. 

The audience knows his mother is suffering while living under the same roof as Phil. She has become an alcoholic because of him. George is unable to stand up to his brother, so it’s up to Peter—the seemingly helpless and quiet being—the rabbit—to save his mother. As Campion slowly unspools Peter’s seemingly inexplicable behaviors, like the clandestine dissections and his overtures of friendship to Phil, the pattern of the young man’s intentions soon become apparent.

The Power of the Dog is a beautifully rendered film, shot in the glorious landscapes of New Zealand. Its beauty belies the malignant presence of its protagonist, much as the psychological complexities—even the sensitivities—of his character are hidden beneath his brutal façade. Campion’s final reveal of his—and Peter’s—inner workings is remarkable. She chooses to use a visual semiotic, almost a dream language, to demonstrate Phil’s yearning and Peter’s scientific ruthlessness and manipulations. The audience understands these two not on a logical or explainable level, but on a more primal, subconscious level—a dreamscape.

The Power of the Dog is a taut, well-constructed and compelling psychological thriller, but it is much more that that. It is an exploration of the deepest parts of the inner self through a visual lexicon of dream imagery that is simultaneously universal and personal, letting us into the darkest corners of the human soul.