Despite the grandeur of its Montana setting, the dark family drama “The Power of the Dog,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, and Jesse Plemons, is claustrophobic, Anthony Lane writes—a chamber piece with chaps.
The new film from Jane Campion, “The Power of the Dog,” is based on Thomas Savage’sof 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?
This is especially true of the Burbank clan. Their bastion is a mansion, richly furnished, with dark wood panelling, like a gentlemen’s club. But look at the gentlemen. George Burbank is stout, compliant, and ill at ease; even on horseback, he wears a black suit. By contrast, his brother, Phil , cuts a lean and leathery figure and spurns the trappings of his affluence, preferring the great outdoors.
The pivot of the plot is Rose Gordon , a widow who runs a boarding house. She has a son, an otherworldly creature named Peter ; 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 amusement 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.
One way to measure “The Power of the Dog” is to lay it beside Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” —another saga of fraternal rivalry, laden with Biblical overtones. Both films are too inward-turning, and too sombrely shadowed, to count as epics, despite the grandeur of their landscapes.
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