The Power of the Dog (2021)Movies

THE POWER OF THE DOG (Jane Campion, USA, 2021, 4) 

Jonny Greenwood’s sharp and stabbing score is great, the vistas are both gorgeous and foreboding, the piano-banjo duet scene has 10 Skandies points secured. The rest … [yawn].

Campion makes another movie about an aggravatingly recessive “heroine” in the wilderness who gets a piano shipped to her. Oh … and there’s lots of … guess … … toxic masculinity that eventually becomes The Big H. (Really … in 2021, is there a bigger cliche than this? And a more-subtly “homophobic” one.)

Really, if you can believe Jesse Plemons and Benedict Cumberbatch are brothers, can imagine Cumberbatch as the Marlboro Man, can look at a prissy male doing the hula hoop ~1920 without laughing, and tolerate more on-the-nose symbolism...