The Power of the Dog (2021)

Jane Campion's bleak western epic is powerful as a slow burn and difficult due to the troubling nature of its lead character, played with wonderful awfulness by Benedict Cumberbatch. But I struggle with the nature of a story that almost pathologises queerness and never quite overcomes this burden. 

This is the story of two brothers, rich ranchers in the early 20th century. One marries a widow and takes in her and her son. The other is a vile bastard who takes every chance he can to be nasty. The film follows him and his new nephew-in-law as they discover each other's fondness for other men and the ending gets dark. 

Where I struggle is with the film's handling of its queer characters. At first they feel like cliches, there is the sensitive effeminate youth played by Smit-McPhee, and Cumberbatch's closeted bully, taking out his internalized homophobia on the younger man. Yes, as the story progresses both become more complicated and go beyond the stereotypes. However both remain deeply unlikable and unrelatable in their otherness. Cumberbatch's character is a deeply cruel man, and even when he takes a liking to Smit-McPhee his personality remains brutal. As the younger character evolves we see him showing psychopathic tendencies, or least a strong lack of empathy and his own potential for cruelty is explored. 

The film doesn't seem able to disentangle their personality failings from their queerness. Or perhaps more acutely it relies on their queerness to be a source of their pathologies. There is no exploration of how they become who they are so it is implied it is all natural.  Just who they are. All of it together. The straight characters around them, who are the control group for the audience centring us, struggle to deal with their inconvenient traits and they are only able to find calm once the queer men are neutralized. 

Campion tells her story methodically, laying one piece after the other in a slow path that doesn't rush. So when Cumberbatch takes a rather sudden turn towards Smit-McPhee it is a bit jarring. Still she quite effectively builds a disquieting tale that is clearly intending to make us uncomfortable, even with the peace at the end. Still I wish she had found a way to make it so the central problem of her story wasn't queer cruel men. 

This raised the question of the heterosexual gaze on queer narratives. I admit that there are amazing queer films out there made by straight film makers. But I think that bar is hard to clear due to the way heterosexist impulses may be imprinted on those queer narratives when the film makers and actors don't have the lived experience to inhabit the queer characters authentically. 

In this case it is the pathologiszing of the closet. There is a popular mythology around homophobic men secretly being closeted homosexuals. This sort of rationalization centres queer men themselves as the problem instead of the heterosexist world they exist in which creates the oppression they are responding to. Campion's film doesn't unpack any of this. Instead it centres our view as the audience within the sympathetic and loving straight characters as they observe the quite othered queer characters who are the centre of this story. Therefore our view remains from the outside with heterosexist expectations and assumptions layered in. This is also evident in Cumberbatch's performance. While technically amazing, it lacks the queer insight to deconstruct his character's behaviour. 

Perhaps a queer director could have layered these contexts into the story. Perhaps a queer actor could have made the character more multidimensional. Perhaps not. The source of this story is a novel written by a gay man who lived the majority of his life closeted. Was this written at a time in his life when his critique of the heterosexual majority culture was capable of disconnecting his own participation in that? I don't know. I don't know the answer to any of these questions. But I do not that this film feels very much like one that doesn't get into the hearts, minds, and underlying motivations of its queer subjects. So no matter how beautiful it is, how elegantly filmed, or how powerfully performed, The Power of the Dog remains a disappointment for its queer audience that it pushes to the margins. 

The Power of the Dog

Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirstin Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Frances Conroy, Keith Carradine, Adam Beech

Writer/Director: Jane Campion