‘Power of the Dog,’ a breed apart

Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” is one of the best-looking Westerns to come out in years, with glorious New Zealand countryside standing in for Montana circa 1925. Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), an all-action ranching dynamo, stands at the center of a family cattle spread. He takes the front steps two at a time while calling his more business-minded brother, George (Jesse Plemons), “Fatso.” (In fairness, Plemons’s face more closely resembles a rectangle of SPAM with each passing year).

Phil makes for a stressful companion, even though he can spin a good yarn. Most of his tales are laudations of his dearly-departed herdsman hero, Bronco Henry, whose saddle horn Phil still polishes every time he visits the barn. It seems Bronco lent Phil his fierce independence, as well as his predilections for frontier nudity and mud baths. Eschewing soap, Phil declares, “I stink and I like it,” even if his malodor offends the nostrils of a Big Sky State Senator who comes to visit the ranch (sadly, he doesn’t even get to see Phil demonstrate a barehanded bull castration technique).

The brothers’ two-man show is disrupted when they meet Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widowed bed and breakfast operator with a teenaged son called Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who makes elaborate paper flowers instead of lassoing calves. George weds Rose and brings her back home, where he insists that she play the piano and take her ease.

Phil hates the new arrival for taking away George’s full attention (previously, the brothers had slept in the same room) and taunts her tin ear because he can whistle any tune and play any ditty on the banjo. In limited screen time, Dunst delivers an unvarnished and convincing portrait of a woman dissolving without her business to run—she secrets bottles of booze all around the place and is rarely seen fully dressed or coherent.

Out of place on the ranch, Pete lisps, makes anatomical drawings, and cuts a very slender figure on the plains with his oversized hat and white shoes. Despite relentless taunts from Phil and the other cowhands, there’s a confidence to this kid you can’t quite put your finger on. Phil at first dismisses the boy with, “Don’t let your mom make a sissy out of you,” but that’s a layered comment in a film full of scenes celebrating the male body. Some passages closely resemble shots in Claire Denis’s new queer cinema landmark “Beau Travail.”

In time, it becomes clear that Phil and Pete have quite a lot in common—the scene where they look into the hills at dusk and see the same thing in the lengthening shadows is sheer perfection. An ongoing project they share—the fashioning of a rawhide rope—reveals the way men pass knowledge to each other, however truculently, down the generations.

“The Power of the Dog” is buoyed by costume design performance for the ages—Kirsty Cameron’s great work gives each character an indelible look. Phil’s deeply worn cowboy wear stinks off the screen, Pete’s un-broken-in denim swishes across the prairie, and George’s citified clothes brand him as a bow-tied outsider from his brother. With a score by Jonny Greenwood that teases the nerves and director of photography Ari Wegner’s wide-open shots of folks breathing in the glory of nature, this is one of the must-see pictures of 2021.