COWBOY UP
Dame Jane Campion sits in a Los Angeles hotel suite talking to the world. A team of Netflix publicists are mustering journalists from various time zones from one virtual waiting room to another, to await their 10-minute chats with the director and her cast about The Power of the Dog, Campion’s Central Otago-shot film set on a 1925 Montana cattle ranch.
The film centres on Phil Burbank, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who owns the family farm with his mild-mannered brother, George (Jesse Plemons). When George marries local widow Rose (Kirsten Dunst), Phil makes life hellishly uncomfortable for his new sister-in-law and her teenage son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), until he forms a strange bond with the young man.
Phil is one conflicted, closeted cowboy. He’s good with a lasso, a banjo and a horse and keeps a shrine in his barn to his mentor, Bronco Henry. He springs from the 1967 Thomas Savage novel, which Campion adapted into her screenplay. Cumberbatch’s performance isn’t.
