In the Flesh: The Power of the Dog

It’s an old story; a man in his prime taking a younger boy, one on the cusp of manhood, under his wing and then into his bed. The Spartans and their boy lovers, the knight and his squire, the Romans with their slaves and puer delicati. On the vast and empty plains of Montana in the year 1925, the men in question are Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his slender, effeminate nephew by marriage, Peter Gordon (Kodi Smit-McFee). What begins as a new front in Phil’s psychological war on his hated sister-in-law, Pete’s anxious and alcoholic mother Rose (Kirsten Dunst), is soon transmuted into real infatuation married to a rough species of mentoring. Phil’s own late lover and mentor Bronco Henry hovers at the margins of much of the film, present in his favorite saddle — left like a sensual and much-loved tombstone before a plaque to his memory — and the monogrammed kerchief Phil uses to clean himself, and to masturbate.

Cumberbatch is excellent as the bow-legged, foul-tempered Phil, a man who after a decade of increasingly embittered waiting around the wreckage of the only real life he ever tasted sees a chance to bring it all back again and reacts with a mixture of poisonous cruelty and pitiable boyhood fragility. His face weathered, his neck scrawny, his sullen adolescent malice and insecurity fill the frame whenever he swaggers on screen. Opposite Smit-McFee’s delicate features and wispy physique he symbolizes both a path to manhood and an obvious deviation from it, a synthesis of Peter’s homoerotic delicacy with the masculine aggression and confidence he lacks. It’s a world of men, a shadow lineage of lovers stretching back into time out of mind, and for all its harshness, the bullying games surrounding its romances, it is spun out of the rare thread of true desire. A scene in which Peter thumbs through an old pornographic volume owned by Bronco Henry carries a heartbreaking erotic charge, one imbued with the deep loneliness of untold thousands of men.

The Power of the Dog is meditatively paced and shot with Campion’s usual dreamlike beauty. The shadows of cattle shifting and flowing near daybreak. Lone riders navigating empty ridges. The convulsive heaving of a beaten horse’s body as she staggers over hard-packed earth, and the gentle golden lantern light that flickers in the barn where Phil soaks rawhide to make a rope for Pete, a symbol to bind them together, to separate them from the main. Whether Pete chooses the rest of the world on his own or else slips into it by chance is left for the viewer to decide, though the former seems more likely. There is love in the world where men take their proteges to learn at their knees, where father and lover intermingle in a shadowy haze of admiration and desire, but the men in that nether-realm are no better or more virtuous than men anywhere, and sometimes the only choice is between different types of loneliness.