Many viewers will have clocked Phil’s orientation much earlier, but Campion presents it as a revelation that makes the pieces of the previous hour fit together. Soon after, Peter happens upon that glen and discovers a stash of Henry’s beefcake mags, which Phil kept.
About halfway through the movie, the camera follows Phil into a secluded glen where he caresses the scarf of his late mentor, Bronco Henry. Though the ultimate dude, he is somehow not like the other cowboys. He also shows grandiose self-loathing (he refuses to bathe so as to keep his “stink”), monkishness (a bachelor, he resents his brother’s marriage), aestheticism (he can shred on banjo), and incongruity (this bull castrator, we learn, has a Yale humanities education). The movie’s early chapters dole out expository dialogue against spare landscapes, gathering curiosity around one question: What is the deal with Phil, the chaps-clad menace of the ranch? His cruelty toward the vulnerable-Rose, Peter, horses-makes him the Platonic ideal of a jackass. Campion’s supposed provocations arise, in large part, from clichés about queer people. Yet the film left me cold, and the acclaim it has sparked seems oddly credulous. The story of interpersonal tensions on a 1920s Montana ranch-ruled by Phil and his brother, George (Jesse Plemons)-has been hailed as a mind-bending study of toxic masculinity and American progress. Such feinting and parrying with gender expectations has helped The Power of the Dog win Best Picture Drama at the Golden Globes and become a frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars. Read: The biblical clash at the core of The Power of the Dog Yet Peter does so as an expression of chivalry: “What kind of man would I be,” he asks, “if I did not help my mother?” Peter’s lisp and slender build make other guys call him “Nancy” and “bitch,” and he uses anthrax on behalf of a woman, his mom (Rose, played by Kirsten Dunst), whom Phil has been mocking and manipulating. In the film’s twist ending, the medical student Peter (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) fatally infects the cow herder Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). Poisoning both is and isn’t a woman’s weapon in Jane Campion’s Western drama, The Power of the Dog. Yet works of entertainment such as Arsenic and Old Lace, Phantom Thread, and Game of Thrones have continuously circled the same logic: When physical prowess and social status confer strength, women fight carefully, in secret, and by exploiting their roles as helpers to men. The majority of real-life murders by poisoning are, as most acts of violence, committed by men.
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“Poison is a woman’s weapon,” Sherlock Holmes says in the 1945 movie Pursuit to Algiers, articulating one of popular culture’s favorite seductive fictions. This article contains spoilers for The Power of the Dog.