We are in Montana, ably played by the high plains of Aotearoa (New Zealand). On an isolated cattle ranch, in 1925, four people – two brothers, a woman and her teenage son – bring us a story of repression and freedom, darkness and light, sex in all its confusions and little of its pleasures. It is a small story condensed into a huge space of vivid, soaring peaks, stunning clefts in high ravines and opaque interiors, laden with heavy, black furniture.
The interiors are dark and cold. The exteriors are light and exhilarating, even when snow dusts the mountains. Terrific tracking shots flip views of the mountains and people with blank walls, indicating that what we see includes what is hidden and what we can’t see remains present. Siting the camera inside a cavernous stable and showing us the folds and clefts of the sunlit mountains, while silhouetting two men, is one of many searing images in the film.
A bevy of cowboys carry a baby grand piano into a baronial ranch house which stands isolated in the prairie, prominent as an unforced error. We are in Jane Campion territory, visually and narratively, with a tip of the hat to E. Annie Proulx. The film itself is burdened with visual and narrative metaphors. The story is told by sweeping through open spaces, then focussing on intimate glades and pools, always bright and seductive. The narrative turns on the tension created in the dark interiors of the ranch house, the stable, the brothel and the hearts of all four protagonists.
The piano being carried into the house is the movement of the story from light to dark, from the potential for the satisfaction of desires to the dominance of repression and violence, underlined by the failed attempt to play The Radetzky March. Campion’s choice of this piece of music fastens the film to male boorishness, as expressed in empires and war.
A woman fails to play the march at a stifling dinner party organised by her husband, to wed himself to the state’s establishment, by hosting the Governor. The party flops. The woman, formerly a piano-player in silent-film cinemas, collapses into herself. She gulps down a garish cocktail and sets out on the path to becoming a drunken hysteric.
She is tormented. Her chief tormentor is her brother-in-law, Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), the younger brother of her husband, George Burbank (Jesse Plemons). Phil is the uncouth. George is the couth. Their fragile bond, running the ranch and sharing a bed, is severed when George decides, without preamble, to ‘take a wife’.
We first meet the brothers on one of their cattle drives to the rail-head, where their stock will be forwarded to the cities for slaughter and consumption. Dangers fester on the range, including from diseased animals. Anthrax stalks the valley.
In classic images of the Western USA of the late 19th century, we see cowboys in leather chaps and broad brimmed hats, smiling and wiping their sweat, before falling on their chicken dinners and later roistering to the rafters with the denizens of the brothel next door.
All but Phil and George.
Phil harasses the young waiter, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), whose widowed mother Rose (Kirsten Dunst) runs the restaurant. He brutally mocks the boy’s artistic flourishes and quiet manner. The cowboys pick up his mocking. Phil is their range-toughened leader. They call the boy ‘nancy.’ Phil disdains the company of women in the brothel and wanders the upstairs corridors, calling for his brother. The film’s engine is sex and desire as expressed in repression and cover-up.
Meanwhile, George has gone ‘a-courting’ with Rose. He finds her crying in the kitchen, pained to see her son traduced and hurt. George lays a hand on her shoulder in one of the film’s most gentle scenes. When he later serves salads to a party of guests, who are surprised to see the well-known rancher take on such a domestic role, we once again drive towards the out-working of desire.
George, as played superbly by Jesse Plemons, may be the film’s hero, if it is possible to name any character as such. In an achingly beautiful scene, Rose and he, returning from their honeymoon, stand facing the great mountains. She attempts to teach him to dance. He falters. He breaks away and starts to cry, emotionally overwrought. He explains that he is happy to no longer be alone.
Phil, the younger brother, is never anything but alone. We learn, almost as an aside, that he is a Harvard-educated classicist. He is also an accomplished musician, excelling on the banjo. His cover may include ‘playing’ at being a cowboy.
When in the midst of his fellow cowboys, he holds himself aloof. They party with the women. He goes upstairs alone. They horse about in the river, naked and beautiful on a summer’s day. He rides by and goes to his private glade, where he strips to pleasure himself using the wine-stained napkin he lifted from the restaurant and which he teased the teenager for carrying in a simpering manner.
When Peter, the teenager, comes upon him and upon his collection of physical health magazines, which include black and white images of male nudes, the film shifts gear and gallops towards the development it was set on from the outset: the bringing together of Phil and Peter.
The pommel of a saddle is pertinently portrayed and lovingly caressed. A cigarette is exchanged in the classic film-trope of a sex act. The braiding and plaiting of a rawhide rope is used by Phil to bind Peter to him, an echo of the way he was bound to his heroic mentor from the ‘old days’, Bronco, with whom he bundled (naked?) in order to survive a winter’s night among the high peaks.
When Peter, sitting with Phil under an isolated haystack, a perfect location for a love-tryst, deftly and dispassionately dispatches an injured rabbit, Phil is not alone in sensing that the story may not conclude as it might have seemed it would. The teenager is a trainee surgeon. He knows how to cut. And he made a vow to save his mother.
The film has already gained numerous awards. It is likely to feature in all the Oscar lists. The principals perform well and embody the film and its themes. The other cast members are set well-back and are no more than cyphers for maleness, family, power and commercialised sex.
Does the film resolve into a cosy, heterosexual, domestic outcome, affirming the traditional nuclear family, albeit one spancilled by a tragic legacy?
It has stayed with me. It has drawn these words from me. I am glad I watched it.
The Power of the Dog by Jane Campion (Netflix)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10293406/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Peter Bradshaw review in The Guardian (London)
The Radetzky March
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebe0Z7k6YdA
