VENICE 2021: The Power of the Dog
VENICEIn almost thirteen years, Jane Campion's first feature film, The Power of the Dog, is a consistently muddled and tonally mismanaged feature. Plagued with so many problems and issues, it actually causes quite the conundrum of where to even begin.
Considered an 'epic', Campion's feature is only an epic in forced intention. This is: far too self-indulgent for its own worth. Not only is it far too long in the tooth, but The Power of the Dog consistently repeats itself with little effect aside from what it achieves the first time around. Showcasing a character as a horrible – clearly internally haunted – projection only to rinse and repeat until the dismal end. Ultimately, this leaves little nuance or audience interest to be found with a film that gets to the point by thinking repetition is the strongest form of narrative. For two hours, it is evidently clear that Campion has not the foresight to understand when the mission is accomplished.
The Power of the Dog is a strange and often tiresome beast that projects conventional and rudimentary stereotypes throughout. Without going into spoilers, the following will be brief and limited in the description. However, to curate theme and point, Campion depicts the most evident and clear stereotypical convictions of characters in her world. Tragically so, without any form of layers or nuance that feels organic nor authentic. Nothing and nobody is otherwise one-dimensional in this cesspool of lethargic creative space. However, to cut deeper, Campion depicts her characters in saturated and derivative motifs that come thick and fast; they are crafted with the intent to surprise, even though such a narrow-minded lense comes off dense and out of touch.
Equally as problematic is the running time and pacing. Split up into chapters, the film offers the transparent fallacy of a story, but as aforementioned, this is a feature with the same sequence reacquired and retooled throughout the one hundred and twenty minutes, a factor that again purposes the difficulty of having to sit through almost two hours of this tiresome drab.
Furthermore, the performances are stagnated and flat. Jesse Plemons, Kirsten Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Thomasin McKenzie are dazzling performers in their own right, yet here they are showcased as uninspired and uninteresting entities that are allocated repetitive depth – or none at all, for that matter. They have so little to muster in terms of narrative punch that Thomasin McKenzie could be cut out in her entirety, and the others could be drastically cut down to non-speaking parts. Made worse is the amount of depth placed on lead Benedict Cumberbatch's shoulders. Again, an accomplished performer in his own right, but here he is frantically miscast to a point it destroys the already horrid production. His accent slips here and there, his emotional anguish never quite depicted to the heights needed, and his tender nuance is about as comfortable and in place as a bus in a cycle lane.
What makes this casting even more strange and further invests in the theory that this is a self-indulgent ego quest is that if Campion truly wanted to subvert conventional expectation, this is not the actor to do it. A far more traditional expected masculine performer would have equally served in the dramatic intent and push through on the audience expectations of what masculinity is defined or projected as. Cumberbatch fails to do both, and anyone hoping the academy award bells are ringing is mad.
Ultimately, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog is a feature that is way too long in the tooth and leaves little nuance or audience interest to be found. It is a feature disastrous in intent and conviction, and as brutal as the following may sound, waiting another thirteen years never to have to see this offers a far greater appeal than having to lay eyes on this feature ever again.
