Like Nomadland, Jane Campion’s western speaks to the American heartland, while Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast is suffering from awards season backlash
With an almighty clang, Jane Campion has hit that tipping point at which the awards-season groupthink clusters around one particular movie. Her western psychodrama The Power of the Dog leads the tally list with a whopping 12 nominations. It is about a toxically dysfunctional confrontation between a rancher played by Benedict Cumberbatch in 1920s Montana and his sister-in-law, played by Kirsten Dunst, brother played by Jesse Plemons and his brother’s sensitive stepson played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Clearly, the Academy has responded to the classic quality of The Power of the Dog: the way it speaks to US culture and history and positions itself unambiguously in the heartland, but a heartland coloured and contorted by anger and sadness, rather like Chloé Zhao’s much-garlanded Nomadland did last year. It’s a movie that reminded me more than a little of the work of George Stevens, though with a 21st-century twist. It is interesting that the director comes from outside the US, and so does its leading man: those tokens of Americanness are being imagined and fabricated by outsiders.
