As hard and isolate, open and defended as the land, Phil has been playing cowboy his entire adult life: He rarely bathes, picks a banjo and castrates bull calves using a blade he then holds in his teeth so he can finish the merciless procedure with his bare hands.
You feel bad for the poor beast , but it’s the other animal that Campion wants you to see, the one seething with rage and flexing his mastery under the admiring gaze of other men.
The story takes place in 1925, more than three decades after the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed and the same year that Buster Keaton starred in the comedy “Go West.” Time seems to have come to a standstill for Phil, though the Burbank family owns one of the area’s few cars.
She fluently sets the western milieu, with its swirling dust and thundering cattle, and catches the boisterous camaraderie of the ranch hands, the playfulness of their jostling with its easy, unselfconscious physicality and intimacy.
It’s a childish move, but in keeping with the infantilism that still shapes the brothers’ uneasy relationship and their awkwardness with outsiders, particularly women.
With the arrival of Rose and Peter, the story also becomes something of a female Gothic, one of those eerie stories about women in suffocating domestic spaces haunted by ghosts and a-swirl with repressed desire.
The book is a novel of the West, and in an afterword written for a reprint, Annie Proulx observes that “something aching and lonely and terrible of the west is caught forever” in Savage’s pages.
Campion, who wrote the screenplay for “The Power of the Dog,” has pared the story down to its essentials, initially building on a series of oppositions, some starkly visible, others more covert.
As has often been the case, including in old Hollywood, these divisions are more complex than they seem and so are Phil and George, whose lifelong dynamic is disrupted by Rose and Peter, a spidery, bookish boy underestimated by everyone.
But it’s a shock when you first see their beds at home and the moment you do, the significance of these terribly sad twin beds, which are better suited for children, sweeps over you like a tidal wave.
Savage writes of Phil: “he had loathed the world, should it loathe him first.” In an ever-tightening circle of hard looks and desperate gestures and moves, Campion and her actors reveal the depths of Phil’s loathing as well as the toll such self-protective hatred takes.
It’s easy to sum up the movie: it is at once a revisionist western, a mystery , an exploration of masculinity and femininity, a lament for the limits the world puts on us and those we shoulder until we can no longer bear them.