The Power of Dog is as real as the roles we play

Whenever we go to the movies, we know beforehand that we will see a story where actors and actresses interpret situations that simulate real life. In Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, this is precisely what happens, but the development of the characters is so perfect that we realize that they are playing roles not to reveal their realities, exactly as happens in the real world when we are not at the movies.

The story is set in Montana, in the north of the United States, in 1925, which would be enough not to classify it as a western, although the rural vocation of the region provides the typical scenographic elements for cowboys, allied to beautiful landscapes that sometimes refer to John Ford’s movie The Searchers (1956), although recorded in New Zealand.

The four main characters of the film are gradually being introduced. Among them, certainly, Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) is the most emblematic: a sexist farmer, he stands out for his rawness, besides an unusual skill with the knife, to castrate calves quickly and mercilessly. Phil’s brother, George (Jesse Plemons), is his opposite: always clean and well-dressed, he is a well-educated person who often tries to get around the awkward situations caused by the cruelty of his brother. In one of them, the "fatso" will console the widow Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), who is crying after Phil treated his "effeminate" son Peter (Kodi Smit-Mcphee) with extreme rudeness,

George ends up marrying Rose, but Phil does not accept the marriage, and the woman’s entry into the house, even with Peter’s sending to university, becomes a focus of tension between wife and brother-in-law. The situation only ends when Phil decides to establish an inexplicable connection with Peter.

The meeting of the two men of (apparently) so different personalities brings reminiscences about Phil’s former mentor, the cowboy Bronco Henry, who died twenty years ago, and from whom the ranger keeps a napkin and a saddle. But the relationship with Peter will come to an unexpected end.