It was always a little tough to buy the legitimacy of Jane Campion’s dark slow-burn drama The Power of the Dog as the best picture frontrunner. A difficult film about festering familial resentment and the destructive wounds of forced masculinity, it was a world away from what we’re used to seeing the notoriously risk-averse Academy rewarding, or even nominating in the first place.
There’s a distinct, unsettling chill that we haven’t experienced in a winner since 2007’s No Country for Old Men (Campion herself has likened the effect of the two endings), every Oscar since going to something that can be broadly, warmly defined as “the film we need right now”, laughs, tears or both guaranteed by the credits. But during a season that’s been mostly more conventional than last year’s, the film has remained out front despite the lack of a “worthy” narrative (star Benedict Cumberbatch’s late-in-the-day attempt to claim his character represents “anyone who hasn’t been seen or heard or understood” is … a stretch). It seemed too good to be true – it was far and away the most compelling film of 2021 – and the recent surge for the inauthentic saccharine of string-pulling remake Coda (winning both PGA and WGA awards over the last weekend) suggests that maybe it is, heart winning over any other part of the body yet again.
Yet big win or not, the recognition awarded to The Power of the Dog (it leads the pack with 12 nominations) marks a victory, not just for films that stimulate rather than sedate but for queer films at large. A considerable swathe of critics might have pretzeled themselves into not defining it as such but it remains an overwhelmingly, fascinatingly, unavoidably gay movie in a murkier way that we’re not used to seeing during awards season. The queer experience – as with many other experiences outside being straight, white and male – is too often flattened, softened and packaged into something more palatable and edgeless for all to understand and relate to.
But Campion refuses to compromise or condescend, presenting gayness as challenging and unfinished and, vitally, existing on a vast spectrum. The generational conflict and then complicated connection between Cumberbatch’s older repressed rancher Phil and Kodi Smit McPhee’s coolly confident Peter represents so much that’s uncomfortably familiar to many gay men without ever being strictly defined. Is there jealousy? Is there desire? Is there a need to protect? Is there a need to destroy? Campion’s delicate, if divisive, script allows for multiple interpretations.
There’s been an ill-fitting unease to the majority of Cumberbatch’s Ay-mare-reek-un work but it’s exactly this tension that makes him so perfect as Phil, cosplaying as someone to hide who he really is; the sad, fake swagger of a man desperate not to give himself away, a reluctant survival tactic that many queer people will be able to recall. It’s the best he’s ever been, deserving of his second Oscar nomination and perhaps first win, complemented by three similarly astute and nominated performances. His unpredictable, and ultimately unknowable, chemistry with an otherworldly Smit-McPhee unfurls on a knife’s edge, sinister at times and heart-shattering at others (the last act moment of Phil, seemingly aware of what Peter has done to him, weakly waiting to give him the rope he’s made, is devastating). It takes place alongside his cruelty towards Peter’s mother, Rose, a never-better Kirsten Dunst, ratcheted up tightly and crescendoing in a hideous dinner party scene, a crushing piece of acting that should guarantee her the Oscar by itself. We see progressively less of his decaying brotherly bond with Jesse Plemons’ George, but the little we have seen tells us everything of their rot, a relationship built entirely on fragile shards of memories, not enough to sustain them into adulthood when the unspoken becomes so much louder than what is being said.
For some viewers, and I imagine for many voters, Campion’s bark has been too quiet – the story too obtuse, the emotions too restrained and the tone too removed – and this inscrutability, coupled with a big, all-eyes release on Netflix, has led to a constant low-level hum of discontent (there may also be enough Sam Elliotts in the Academy to count against it at the final hurdle for other, gayer reasons). But unlike so many other desperate-to-be-loved films of this or any other Oscar season, The Power of the Dog never once craves universality. You either see what Phil does in the hills or you don’t.
