BEST FILM OF 2021
Power of the Dog Takes the Crown
Jane Campion’s film Power of the Dog is about innocence almost taken. Power of the Dog wins our Best Film of 2021, no other film left a haunting mark on our staff as did this one. We still recall beautiful images of land and horses and of the people we met in the film painted perfectly by the actors and Campion. Jane Campion’s story was set in rural Montana in 1925 but she preferred the safety of New Zealand to film the entire film. She said,”It looks real and it feels real.” And it was very real.
Campion always brings an uneasy balance of natural beauty and wonder to compliment the brutal. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a charismatic rancher, Phil Burbank, who inspires both awe and fear around him. Cumberbatch seems to relish his role as a villain. His quiet brother George Burbank, played by Jesse Plemons, brings home a new wife, beautiful Rose Gordon played by Kirsten Dunst, and her over mothered young teenage son Peter Gordon, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee in the breakout role of the year. It is Rose who first senses her son may be in danger as we see a mother’s angst cross her face as she spies the rancher Phil who has persuaded her son Peter to go riding horses together through the fields.
Phil tortures them all until he begins to fall for the paper flower making son. Jane Campion is telling us a story that is not the story once again. The performances of all the actors are perfect and the planned seductive slow dance of Phil and the smart, young and innocent seeming Peter is a marvel to behold. Benedict Cumberbatch and Kodi Smit-McPhee will be award contenders as well as Jane Campion. If we could have one wish, it would be that she would make films more frequently.
