The year is 1925. In Europe, Benito Mussolini declares himself dictator of Italy. In nearby Germany, Adolph Hitler publishes the first volume of Mein Kampf. In America, F. Scott Fitzgerald also publishes a book, this one set in New York: The Great Gatsby. In Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin delights audiences with the dance of the dinner rolls in The Gold Rush, while Lon Chaney scares their pants off with The Phantom of the Opera. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Eisenstein pushes the cinematic form to new heights with Battleship Potemkin. And back in Washington D.C., 25,000 hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan march down the National Mall.

But out on the Montana range, the Burbank Ranch operates like it’s “nineteen-hundred and nothing.” Maybe even earlier.

Penned by Thomas Savage and published in 1967, The Power of the Dog’s 1925 setting is fascinating. With the exception of a few cars and some electric lights, little here feels like the 20th century. Nineteen twenty-five is also smack-dab in the middle of Prohibition, yet no one seems to have trouble finding a drink. Might this be the mythic West: The land that time left behind?

At the center of all this stands Phil Burbank, the well-educated eldest son of wealthy ranchers. Phil runs the Burbank Ranch with his younger brother, George, and the two could not be more different. Soft-spoken and kind, George wears modern dress, drives a car into town, and marries the widow Rose, who has a teenage son, Peter. As harsh and jagged as the Montana wilderness, Phil bathes infrequently and wears tattered western wear, including dusty chaps and jangling spurs everywhere he goes. And though he’s surrounded by his field hands, the stench of loneliness clings to Phil, a man who lives his life by a self-imposed code of conduct, one he attributes to his mentor: Bronco Henry.

It’s a stroke of genius that Savage never reveals much about Bronco Henry. According to Phil, he was a true man’s man, a cowboy worth aspiring to. Bronco Henry taught Phil and George everything they know about ranching—the elder Burbanks, known as the “Old Lady” and the “Old Gent,” have been living off their fortunes and their sons’ labor in Salt Lake City for some time now. Oh, and one other thing: Bronco Henry also had a romantic relationship with Phil, who was 20 years Bronco Henry’s junior.

Writing in the late 1960s, Savage makes this relationship obvious but not explicit—more on that in a second. Further complicating matters is Phil’s intense homophobia and self-loathing, which takes the form of relentless cruelty. But is this cruelty a result of falling in love with Bronco Henry and then losing him—Henry died in a riding accident in 1904—or something Bronco Henry weaponized within Phil? Phil idolizes masculinity and toughness above all else, deploring anything smacking of femininity and softness. He teases George incessantly, calls him “fatso” any chance he can, cuts down a drunk so harshly and publicly the man is driven to suicide, and refers to the young Peter as “Nancy” due to his mannerisms and appearance.

Savage leaves the origins of Phil’s anger up to the reader. Instead, he paints a mythic specter of Bronco Henry that haunts the Burbank Ranch. The cowhands all idolize him despite never having met him. Instead, everything they know about Bronco Henry—and everything we know—comes via Phil.

Ditto for Jane Campion’s cinematic adaptation of Savage’s book. Made in New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic and released in 2021, The Power of the Dog is a western filled with intense violence free from firearms and gunshots. Instead, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) is armed with words that slice as effectively through his victims as his pocketknife castrates bulls.

As revealed in the dialogue, Phil is a rich kid, educated at Yale—“Does he yell at the horses in Greek or Latin?” the governor jokes—and talented in ways far surpassing those living at the Burbank Ranch and in the nearby town of Beech. When Rose (Kirsten Dunst) moves in with the Burbanks, husband George (Jesse Plemmons) purchases her a baby grand piano so she can entertain guests. Rose used to accompany silent pictures, but that was a long time ago, before her first husband, and she’s out of practice. “I know only tunes,” she says.

But she tries, practicing Johann Strauss’ “Radetzky March” when she thinks she has the house to herself. What she doesn’t know, but the audience does, is that Phil has entered and gone upstairs to his room on the second floor. And while Rose stumbles her way through Strauss’ jaunty tune, Phil uses his banjo to mock her. Phil follows Rose’s lead, hitting the right notes at the right time while she falters. Rose tries again and again, but for every time she stumbles, Phil succeeds. And in a burst of virtuosic playing, Phil takes Strauss’ song and reconfigures it in a way that all but destroys Rose’s confidence. 

Campion and cinematographer Ari Wegner shoot this scene with a masterful eye, leaving the camera above Rose, not quite at the height of the second floor, but high enough you get the impression Phil is lording over her. And when Campion and editor Peter Scieberras cut to Phil on the second floor, they choose a matching low-angle shot of Phil, banjo wielded like a repeater rifle, and a close-up of Phil’s ever-present spurs. Those spurs are used to goad horses on, and here, Phil goads Rose into submission and, eventually, alcoholic despair. 

Though The Power of the Dog is firmly Phil’s movie, it is not an empathetic character study in the vein of Taxi Driver or M. Instead, the terror Phil wields over the ranch goes largely unanalyzed and makes his eventual comeuppance all the more satisfying. And where Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver script was a revisionist spin on the 1956 western, The Searchers, Power of the Dog plays almost like a revisionist western in reverse. From the presence of electricity and automobiles to the look and behavior of the ranch hands, The Power of the Dog would not have felt out of place in 1970s New Hollywood.

But Campion and Wegner use the iconography of the western to turn back the clock. Notice how Wegner photographs Phil’s scrubby, short-brimmed brown hat so that it looks black while Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) rocks a pristine white broad-brimmed Stetson. If The Power of the Dog had come out in 1925, audiences wouldn’t have had any trouble figuring out who was the hero and who was the villain.

Campion retains much of Savage’s novel but dispels with most of the backstory, specifically the story of Rose’s first husband, Johnny—Beech’s town doctor, who fell into alcoholism. Doctor Johnny tries to kick the habit but can’t. And in a scene where Johnny bears the brunt of Phil’s cruelty in a saloon, the confrontation obliterates what little dignity the good doctor has left. He then goes home, hangs himself, and his son, Peter, discovers the body.

Savage dedicates 28 pages to Doctor Johnny and his demise. Campion cuts that down to two or three lines of dialogue spoken by Peter. Peter dispenses with this information so tersely that when I first saw Power of the Dog at the Telluride Film Festival in 2021, I was convinced Peter had committed patricide—either directly or through nefarious influence. Part of that assumption was due to Campion’s omission of Doctor Johnny’s interaction with Phil, and part was retroactive speculation based on Peter’s ability to kill without remorse. There are two on-screen murders in The Power of the Dog, and Peter commits both.

But armed with the information Savage delivers explicitly in the book, that scene plays much differently. Peter does not start The Power of the Dog as a psychopath lying in wait for his next victim. Instead, you can see how this once sweet boy with a scientific mind is slowly turned by Phil’s meanness—meanness towards him, his mother, and everyone else. “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog,” Peter recites. Savage opens his novel with Psalm 22:20, King James Version, and Campion closes her movie with it. Villains are the ones who kill for pleasure and profit. Heroes are the ones who kill the villains. And, as Savage writes on the final page of The Power of the Dog: “The dog was dead.”

Author Annie Proulx—who penned the short story, Brokeback Mountain—illustrates in her afterword to modern-day reprints of The Power of the Dog that a good deal of material for the novel comes from Savage’s biography. Savage’s step-uncle set the stage for Phil, a man who “loathed the world should it loathe him first.” In other interviews, Proulx also points out that Savage was gay at a time when it was “neither fashionable nor safe,” and so much of The Power of the Dog occurs between the lines. There’s enough ranching and riding and roping that someone like my grandfather, who loved western literature, could have read and enjoyed it. I have no idea if he did. Probably not, because according to Proulx, The Power of the Dog was a big hit with the critics, many calling it a western classic, but it failed to catch on with the public. Makes sense when you think about it: In 1967, Italian westerns were at a peak of popularity and production, and Hollywood westerns were entering a new era. Homosexuality on the range was still a ways off, and Big-Daddy ranch yarns felt like a thing of the past. 

Still, The Power of the Dog resonates simply through the strength of Savage’s narrative. It’s little wonder why Campion read it and felt compelled to turn it into cinema. As producer Tanya Seghatchian says in Assouline’s coffee table book treatment of the movie, Savage’s novel is “curiously modern for a book written in the 1960s and set in the 1920s.”

Seghatchian isn’t the only one who finds Savage’s 1925 setting cause for curiosity. Before knowing Savage’s biography, that date also caught in my mind. There is something about it that doesn’t seem arbitrary. Thanks to Proulx’s afterward, it now makes sense to me why Savage would set his novel then: He’s using a past era to understand a current one. Maybe the one he’s writing in. Maybe even the one the reader is reading it in. Or watching the cinematic adaptation.

For this reason, it’s hard not to look for clues and moments that can be extrapolated outward. For the characters, for the story, maybe even for the author. It’s a fool’s errand because no author can ever predict how their work will be taken. Yet, there is one passage in Savage’s novel that stopped me cold:

[Doctor John had] an astounding gift for diagnosis. Years later, in the days of specialists, he might have triumphed, might have had an office with heavy Spanish furniture and Persian rugs—and so are we sometimes born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“And so are we sometimes born in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I think Phil would agree with that sentiment. Had he been born a century later, the ability to be an openly gay man might have dispelled his cruelty. But I bet he wishes he was born a century earlier, in the time of Lewis and Clark, when he could be even more masculine, even more alone. Would Savage’s book have done better business in another era? And what of the movie? The Power of the Dog cleaned up on the 2021-22 awards circuit but never captured the heart of the public. Might it have done better had it been made a decade prior or later?

These are silly speculations because they amount to nothing. Yet, I can’t shake that phrase: “So are we sometimes born in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And in a rather sad book about a bunch of sad people, some of whom meet a sad fate, the line “so are we sometimes born in the wrong place at the wrong time” feels the saddest and truest of them all.  

The Power of the Dog (2021)
Written and directed by Jane Campion
Based on the novel by Thomas Savage
Produced by Jane Campion, Iain Canning, Roger Frappier, Tanya Seghatchian, Emile Sherman
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Kirsten Dunst
Netflix, Rated R, Running time 126 minutes, Premiered Sept. 2, 2021 at the Venice Film Festival