“The Power of the Dog” is Jane Campion’s Anti-Western

The new film from Jane Campion, “The Power of the Dog,” is based on Thomas Savage’s novel of the same name, published in 1967. The title echoes the Twenty-second Psalm, in the King James Bible: “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.” As the movie ends, you can’t help asking yourself: Who exactly is the dog, and who’s the darling?

The year is 1925, and the place is Montana, which is played onscreen by Campion’s native New Zealand. Whether it fulfills the role convincingly—not least in regard to trees and vegetation—is a question that only Montanans will be qualified to answer. What’s undeniable is the glory of the hills, camel-colored and weirdly folded, that loom in the backdrop of the tale. We are in ranching country, though where we are, at any given moment, isn’t always clear; it takes a while to get one’s bearings, economic as much as geographical. As Annie Proulx has noted, in an afterword to Savage’s book, few of us can understand “the combination of hard physical work and quiet wealth that characterized some of the old ranches.”

This is especially true of the Burbank clan. Their bastion is a mansion, richly furnished, with dark wood panelling, like a gentlemen’s club. But look at the gentlemen. George Burbank (Jesse Plemons) is stout, compliant, and ill at ease; even on horseback, he wears a black suit. By contrast, his brother, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), cuts a lean and leathery figure and spurns the trappings of his affluence, preferring the great outdoors. We learn that he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, yet refinement of any sort disgusts him; when the governor of the state comes to dine, George requests that Phil clean himself up beforehand. No luck. As Phil says, “I stink and I like it.”

This rub of the rough against the smooth—of wilder ways confronting more cultivated ones—will be familiar to followers of Campion. Who can forget “The Piano” (1993), and the sight of Holly Hunter, in her bonnet and her billowing skirt, being borne ashore, amid a surge of waves, and deposited on the alien sands of New Zealand? As for ill-matched siblings, they were crucial to Campion’s début film, “Sweetie” (1989), whose title character trampled on the life of her sister. Yet something about the clashes in “The Power of the Dog” feels overworked and set up. On a prosaic level, I never quite believed in George and Phil as brothers, and the movie’s closeups tend to belabor a symbolic point: artificial flowers, crafted from cut paper; a hand caressing the curves of a well-buffed saddle; a bull calf being castrated. On the page, mind you, Savage describes the discarded testicles being tossed onto the fire, where they explode like popcorn, so moviegoers get off lightly.

The pivot of the plot is Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who runs a boarding house. She has a son, an otherworldly creature named Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee); as thin as a sapling, and flitting to and fro in white shoes, he is the one who makes the flowers. When the ranchers stop at Rose’s place for a meal, Phil taunts Peter, to the amusement of the tough guys, and to Rose’s evident dismay. George, abashed by his brother’s bluntness, offers his apologies to Rose, and that’s not all. Reader, he marries her! The upshot is that Rose and Peter move in with George and Phil. The latter, as you might imagine, despises the intrusion; he calls Rose “a cheap schemer” to her face. Campion now has her principal characters where she wants them.

And there they stay. Do not be misled by the setting into construing this movie as a Western. It’s more of a chamber piece with chaps, largely roam-free, and you soon realize that it ain’t going anywhere. Rather, it’s sticking around and digging into the various cruelties and miseries on display, like a surgeon exploring a wound. Rose, humiliated by Phil, and socially out of her depth, takes to drink, her features increasingly ruddied by liquor and tears. (It’s a major role for Dunst, yet so oppressive as almost to grind her down.) George dwindles from view. Phil, for reasons that he chooses to conceal, draws unexpectedly close to Peter, and takes him out riding. Peter, in return, has secret ambitions of his own.

One way to measure “The Power of the Dog” is to lay it beside Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” (1955)—another saga of fraternal rivalry, laden with Biblical overtones. (Kazan’s leading man, James Dean, reads out the Thirty-second Psalm.) Both films are too inward-turning, and too sombrely shadowed, to count as epics, despite the grandeur of their landscapes. Why, then, in terms of momentum, should “East of Eden” be so much the stronger? Perhaps because of Dean, and the twisted, unslackening, near-laughable grip of his presence; he doesn’t seem to know what he’s going to do next, and the suspense is contagious. Though Cumberbatch, too, can be compelling, and though you constantly wonder what is stored in reserve behind his wintry gaze, he is at heart a master of urbanity, and not everyone will be convinced that he’s truly at home on the range. Still, you should certainly seek out the movie, and relish its central standoff: Rose, downstairs, stumbling through an awkward tune on a piano, versus Phil, plucking away on his banjo, without mercy, in a room overhead. The scene is as tense as the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Guess who wins.

There are helicopter parents, and then there are tennis parents. Tennis parents are more like the choppers in “Apocalypse Now” (1979), overcoming every little setback with the help of napalm and Wagner. Even among tennis parents, however, few have matched the firepower of Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams. He is now the hero of the modestly titled “King Richard,” a new film from Reinaldo Marcus Green, which follows Venus and Serena—played with robust good humor, and stinging forehands, by Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton, respectively—from girlhood to the brink of stardom. Yet the movie isn’t really about them. How come?

Because Richard is played by Will Smith. It’s one of Smith’s all-consuming performances. He’s often alone in the frame, and, when other folks do cluster around, he remains the hub of dramatic attention. Hunching his shoulders, lowering his head, and thrusting out his jaw, Smith looks ever-primed for the fray—startlingly so, because we know how loose and gangly he can be. He still gets plenty of laughs, but there’s a militant edge to the comedy. Simple shots of him, at the wheel of an old camper van, show a soul no longer capable of repose. At night, Richard works as a security guard, and carries a weapon; by day, he favors tennis shorts and sneakers. Either way, he’s like a soldier who won’t get out of his uniform. The call to action can come at any time.

Richard and his wife, Brandi (Aunjanue Ellis), live in Compton with their five daughters. I kept hoping to hear the other three girls talk among themselves about Venus and Serena, but no such scene occurs. (Any whisper of disunity would be inimical to the purpose of the film; solidarity is all.) The domestic regime is stern, with obligatory straight A’s at school. Tennis practice continues even in a downpour—volleys and smashes only, since the balls won’t bounce. Now and then, Richard falls foul of local thugs. “Daddy got beat up again,” the girls report, with a sigh. When cops and social services come by to check on the family, Richard responds by commanding his kids to spell the word “civilization.” He declares, “We got future doctors, and lawyers, plus a couple of tennis stars in this house.” For Venus and Serena, he has a particular plan. It runs to seventy-eight pages. He wrote it before they were born.

The movie’s big reveal is withheld until the end credits, in which Venus and Serena Williams are named as executive producers. So much for objectivity. Yet audiences know when they’re being sold something, and they would balk at “King Richard” if it were merely a slab of promotional P.R. As it is, when I saw the film, with a big crowd, you could sense people leaning into the story and feeding off its verve. The atmosphere that is brewed by Green and his director of photography, Robert Elswit, is a blend of the aggressive and the benign. Nothing is more welcoming or more sun-smothered, for example, than the Florida tennis academy to which Venus and Serena are invited by a leading coach, Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal), with their sisters and their parents in tow; no sooner do they arrive, however, than Richard announces that Venus will not be competing on the junior circuit. She will bide her time and then, at his behest, turn pro.

Is there madness in Richard’s method? Unquestionably. Even if he began by deliberately pushing two of his children into a super-white sport, could he honestly have foreseen that they would indeed conquer the field? Surely not. What makes Green’s film so persuasive is that other characters—above all, the redoubtable Brandi Williams—are alive to everything that’s absurd and overbearing, as well as noble, in the hero’s cause. “You are the most stubborn person I’ve met in my life,” one guy says to Richard. “And I coach McEnroe.” ♦