With an almighty clang, Jane Campion has hit that tipping point at which the awards-season groupthink clusters around one particular movie. Her western psychodrama The Power of the Dog leads the tally list with a whopping 12 nominations. It is about a toxically dysfunctional confrontation between a rancher played by Benedict Cumberbatch in 1920s Montana and his sister-in-law, played by Kirsten Dunst, brother played by Jesse Plemons and his brother’s sensitive stepson played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Clearly, the Academy has responded to the classic quality of The Power of the Dog: the way it speaks to US culture and history and positions itself unambiguously in the heartland, but a heartland coloured and contorted by anger and sadness, rather like Chloé Zhao’s much-garlanded Nomadland did last year. It’s a movie that reminded me more than a little of the work of George Stevens, though with a 21st-century twist. It is interesting that the director comes from outside the US, and so does its leading man: those tokens of Americanness are being imagined and fabricated by outsiders.
