The Power of the Dog Is a Tamped-Down Melodrama of Masculinity
Right at the point that director Jane Campion should have pushed us all the way to the edge of our seats with fever-pitch intensity in The Power of the Dog, she pulls back to the solemnly serious. Just give us the melodrama, Jane!
Kodi Smit-McPhee and Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog. (Netflix)
Is the melodrama making an unannounced comeback? The French have been turning them out, with Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and now France starring Léa Seydoux (No Time to Die, The French Dispatch), a film that has been described as an “uneven blend of satire and melodrama” that sounds like it might be just what our deranged era requires.
In English-language films currently in release, Spencer is a weird and wonderful melodrama largely unrecognized as such by most critics. And now The Power of the Dog, screening on Netflix, has a colorful melodramatic narrative. Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead wrote the agitated scores for both films. But the big, deliberately lurid stylistic effects of melodrama are firmly tamped down by Jane Campion (The Piano, Portrait of a Lady, Angel at my Table, Sweetie), who’s a respected arthouse director and doesn’t involve herself in such lowly popular genres.
Which is a shame, because when it comes to the basic narrative, all the elements are there to make a real barn burner of a melodrama. The stormy villain backed by wealth and power, terrorizing the captives in his remote gloomy home; his cowed brother; the downtrodden widow he marries; and her frail-looking teenage son.
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