the power of the dog

In an era where the ideal of "strength" relentlessly persists within the confines of aggressiveness, muscularity and machismo, The Power of the Dog completely upends it in Jane Campion's quietly stirring revisionist western (based upon a novel by Thomas Savage). It's another vibrant, illuminating film in Campion's oeuvre; her fiercely intelligent period pieces such as An Angel at My Table, Bright Star, The Piano, and Portrait of a Lady, are always slightly askew from expectations and conventions. This tale set in dusty 1925 Montana feels much more bracing, fresh and subversive than many contemporary movies--and its all captured skillfully and unassumingly. 

Benedict Cumberbatch's vociferous rancher Phil is an aching mess of a character to behold--his hidden queerness gnawing him up inside and out. We watch the sensuality of him buffering a saddle of the departed Bronco Henry; and crawl through the trunks of trees to a clearing and a small lake where he luxuriates after slathering himself in mud--a place where him and Bronco Henry once shared. There are many heavy, literary metaphors like this in The Power of the Dog, but yet, not so heavy that they sink the movie. Instead, they enrich the picture--its tensions and mysteries building throughout. Phil is living in the same house as his brother George (Jesse Plemons, in another finely-tuned character turn) and George's former innkeeper wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who visits when not in medical school. Phil and George are wealthy ranch owners: Phil lives a doggedly grubby cowboy existence while George, to Phil's disdain, dresses and lives in a conservatively posh manner. Their relationship feels tenuous from the beginning, when Phil refers to him (and inherently, his lifestyle) as "Fatso." Rose and Peter, who Phil contemptuously describes as "a suicide widow and her half-cooked son," are suddenly wound within Phil's taunts and broody, agitated loneliness. A competition of companionship almost emerges within all of these characters from the throes of Phil. When Rose haltingly plays the "Thunder and Lightning Waltz" by Johann Strauss Jr. on the grand piano George gifted her, Phil one-ups her upstairs in the stairwell with a virtuosic take of the tune on his banjo; later, he taunts her, hidden from view, from an open window, whistling its melody. Phil is all thunder and lightning indeed in this quartet. Cumberbatch's embodiment is so red-blooded and alive, the viewer can sense everything that's going to make him tick, as one readies for what he is going to inflict next upon the others. He bullies Peter at first (him and the fellow cowhands are brutal), but slowly Phil becomes flummoxed by him and closer to him--almost emulating Bronco Henry ("He taught me to use my eyes in ways that other people can't") and the dynamic between him and himself when he was Peter's age. Any attraction he may have to Peter is  impossibly buried. As Peter, the lanky, rail thin Smit-McPhee, gives a haunting portrayal--his serenity and intellect a vigorous match against Phil. Kirsten Dunst is eerily captivating as Rose, as we watch her downward spiral into alcoholism. Despite their modest lives, none of the characters of this tale ever seem comfortable with themselves, especially when someone so loveless is taking up all the air in this ever-chilly house. 

As expected of any Campion film, the crafts are top-notch. Jonny Greenwood's tremulous, rugged string score adds to the anxiety, as it did in his masterful work on Spencer this year.  I was taken by Ari Wegner's photography (who also shot this year's bold-looking Zola). Campion has always been a director with a sense of the rigorous physicality of nature, rather than just ornamental pretty shots. The streams of herded cattle, blood-flecked wheat, the dusk skies--clouds edged with faded sunlight--the plains and far off mountain ranges like a wounded, muscled back and the roaming harsh, hardened ridges of Phil's closed-up heart. ***1/2

-Jeffery Berg

bright threads

Australian costume designer Janet Patterson has collaborated with Jane Campion on The Piano and Portrait of a Lady both earning her Academy Award nominations (she also received one for Gillian Armstrong's Oscar & Lucinda).

In Bright Star, the costume design becomes an intricate part of character as Fanny creates and sews her own clothing. Keats wears a signature blue jacket for much of the film.

Jane Campion noted in an interview for Tribeca Film that Fanny's outfits change from bold and ruffly to more muted and understated to finally black, in the somber closing scene, because "she's under his influence .... We imagined that as he got more ill, it was probably toned down. As a fact, she used to dress up for him. (Campion gets up and imitates what Fanny would've done at the window.) 'Oh, I've got a new dress sewn. Come to the window and I'll show it to you.' I do imagine it became a little more sober."

Producer Jan Chapman noted, "Janet Patterson ... works a lot from character and story, rather than thinking, 'That's a great costume, and I'll put it on that person.' She tries to work out their world and what they might've had and also she works with fabrics and textures, also knowing she would have control of the colors and look of the sets. What I love about Janet as a designer is that she works for story, not just for the look. And yet she's a deeply stylish person."

starry eyed

In Wislawa Szymborska's Nobel Lecture, "The Poet and the World," she remarks that the work of poets is "hopelessly unphotogenic." Jane Campion's Bright Star is an exception: an exceptional movie about poetry and the passionate romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Campion successfully showed the life of another poet Janet Frame in Angel at My Table and brought a modern perspective to The Portrait of a Lady, an underrated adaptation of Henry James. The focus in Bright Star is appropriately much tighter than Campion's previous work, resisting autobiography or much back-story. The story immediately plunges into the passion of Brawne and Keats with its tragic results.

It is a breakthrough performance for Australian actress Abbie Cornish as Fanny. Throughout the film, she is vibrant, alive and in-love to the point of sickness. Her final scenes, including an incredibly raw breakdown, are haunting. She is well-matched by the sinewy and handsome Ben Whishaw (who was quite good as Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited). Their romantic chemistry is often palpable. The intensity can be attributed to Campion's restraint. Sure, there are butterflies flitting about and stolen kisses under canopies, but the film is also grounded in the darker aspects of the human heart.

Bright Star is lensed lovingly by Greig Fraser and the score by Mark Bradshaw is never overpowering. The film is a respectful ode to the work of Keats, including his process of writing and his modest influence on literature at the time (he ended up, of course, being an immense posthumous influence for many), without drowning in what could have been both maudlin and saccharine. ***1/2

-Jeffery Berg

The love letters and poems by Keats are available in book form here.