‘POWER OF DOG’ – THE OTHER KIND OF MOVIE TO PAY ATTENTION TO

By Dominique Paul Noth

There are distinctly different kinds of movies competing for the top prizes like the Oscars.

There are the films fashioned along blockbuster lines in which even good actors are given dialog that announces their intentions (often already revealed by their costumes). The directors use reams of audio sound effects and rapid cinematic cutting to signal the emotions the audience is supposed to feel. Sophisticated computer graphics interface (cgi) speaks volumes to the viewer. Promotional campaigns emphasize the visceral oomph behind the logos. This is not necessarily Marvel films but any mammothly orchestrated enterprise.  

The second category is the subtler movies in which every framing of the content and the landscape reflect a purpose, in which the psychology of the characters and their almost-interaction can be so subtle that we have to pay attention to every line reading and every look, in which the tonal quality of the behavior and the nuances require us to expect meaning in every moment – in which, frankly, the director relies on our input.

(Some of today’s movies, such as "The Last Duel," try to dance between the blockbuster style and the subtler one.)

Strangely many of the second category films are only available through streaming, and hence not just in competition with the best of HBO but in competition with sitcoms, reality shows, serial dramas, and Madison Avenue methods that do not require careful attention and even are programmed so we can visit the refrigerator for refreshments while they unfold.  In home viewership, with many people spread around the couch after a hard day’s work, moviegoers have to give over special attention to compensate.

Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst in
'The Power of the Dog'.

An example of the subtler kind of movie is Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, now mainly available on Netflix. The New Zealand (now Australian) director brings a special sort of attention to her psychological tales and some viewers will assume automatically in the first minutes just who the top dog of the title is at this remote and lucrative Montana cattle ranch in 1925 run by two vastly different brothers.

The obvious alpha dog is Phil Burbank, played by Benedict Cumberbatch as a muscular sarcastic hard-nose cowboy totally at home with boots, castration knives and banjo, literally wallowing in mud and bossing everyone around him with stern looks and harsh words. After 25 years he still calls  his older brother George “fatso” though this fatso, as quietly and thoughtfully played by Jesse Plemons, stolidly walks through the punches unperturbed, sticking to his softer mannerisms and social concerns, willing to court despite his brother’s scorn a neighboring widowed innkeeper, Rose. She is played in engaging suffering by Kirsten Dunst as so meek and fearful of Phil’s barbs that she takes to drink.

Rose has a college age son, Peter, so thin, awkward and effeminate that Phil immediately sees an easy target in Peter’s playing with paper flowers and dissecting animals as, he says,  a preliminary to studying medicine.  As naturalistically played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, there may be more will and determination within Peter than the dominating Phil realizes.

The evolving relationships among these corners unfold so slowly and deliberately that I suspect some viewers may not realize how much is being revealed, so conditioned have they become to movies that tell them how to think rather than trapping them into awareness.

Cumberbatch, already a star player in everything from Sherlock to Hamlet, commands a great deal of pleasure in watching him bend his highly trained British voice and talents to an American taciturn prototype, a deliberately nasty man who hides his intellect within a rustic legend of his own creation, modeled after his late hero, Bronco Henry, the ultimate perfect cowboy in the Tom Mix vein who shaped him -- in some strange shapes, as we slowly learn.

Cumberbatch submerges and refines his skills to totally capture Phil – making him a fierce physical presence as well as a Freudian puzzle, but expert students of his methods will note how exactly he has turned his vocal and sarcastic talents to fit a different mold.  I for one could not subdue knowledge of Cumberbatch’s techniques though I had a lot of fun watching how he did it.

I was more impressed – Oscar level impressed, in fact – by Plemons' unpretentious but touching work as the brother, of Dunst’s skill at making us grip Rose’s fear as well as her clinging niceness and particularly by how well Smit-McPhee lets Peter’s personality creep up on us, and I do mean creep.

All of this is made possible by director Campion’s care and trust in her actors and in letting the subtleties unfold at what many may see as a stately pace as she commits to the place and the tempo of the story.

This is billed in some quarters as a western, but only if films like “Hud” are westerns, only if we recognize that Campion is saying something different about the milieu of the Old West and our attitudes about those times. Something else is going on as the cowboys skin hides and bathe in the creek with Stetsons strategically placed over their X-rated parts.  There are power plays underway, but don’t presume to know who the top dog is in a movie too easy to overlook at awards time. Just don’t overlook it now.

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About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.