When Malevolence Takes Your Heart
You wouldn’t expect it from Benedict Cumberbatch...the malevolence, that is.
So far, I have not been a big fan of Benedict Cumberbatch’s work as an actor, except for in 2014’s The Imitation Game. Alan Turing’s genius, so threatened by the English laws against homosexuality in the 1940s, had no equal. The computer revolution, at least in significant part, was begun by Turing during the Second World War. It was he who invented and developed the “computer” machine that broke Germany’s most difficult military code and helped the Allies bring the war to its end. It could be said that, for what we have now, we owe Alan Turing.
Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Turing in this film displays the man’s self-effacing genius, his difficulties with the usual government apparatchiks (often so present and stifling whenever genius is in the room), and the very real necessity that he keep his own sexual preferences a close secret. Cumberbatch does all this with dignity and verve. It is a marvelous, challenging performance.
The rest of Cumberbatch’s movies? I stopped paying attention a while ago.
But now we have Phil Burbank, the scruffy, dirt-laden, oppressively rude Montana cowboy in Joan Campion’s The Power of The Dog. Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Phil (who is crude, growlingly mono-syllabic, and dangerous) is an object acting lesson in how to make such a repellant man into a sympathetic character.
Phil treats everyone miserably, except for the crew of rough cowboys that he leads on the ranch that his brother owns. His brother, George, played by Jesse Plemons, is the actual inheritor of the ranch, and is usually cowed by Phil’s aggressive rudeness. Early in the film, George marries a local cook, Rose, played by Kirsten Dunst, and Phil treats her even worse than he treats everyone else. She seems to be an interruptive threat to his control of his brother George.
But Rose has a teenage son, Peter, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, who is most probably gay. Excessively good-looking, very shy, a sculptor of paper flower arrangements, and insecure, he becomes a singular target for Phil’s wrath and punishment.
Everyone shies away from Phil. They try to avoid him when they can. But such avoidance is seldom achieved. Phil gets into everyone’s business all the time, and castigates everyone, some more than others. But everyone, nonetheless. He has no redeeming qualities.
So, when I was watching the film the first time, I turned it off after twenty minutes, asking myself, why do I want to pay attention to such a macho schmuck as this Phil?
Phil’s character was going directly against one of my long-held beliefs in how to present a villain. In my own work, I strive to give the villain a heart, at least of some sort. I believe the best villains are those with whom—as a reader or viewer, somehow deep down, and despite your hatred for him or her—you can sympathize. (Please see the character Theo Bergeron in my novel, The Moment Before.)
A few examples of my favorite villains? Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the perfumer in Patrick Suskind’s novel, Perfume, who is a genius in his making of scents, and the murderer of those from whose bodies he takes the scents. You will shudder at his every action, and wonder why you find him so fascinating. Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man, marvelously played almost always with a smile and with charming insouciance by Orson Welles. The clergyman, Mr. Collins, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, whose oily romancing of Elizabeth Bennett makes my skin crawl.
Now I can add Phil Burbank.
Phil’s own homosexuality is kept so close a secret by him that (as is very slowly revealed by Joan Campion’s script, her terrific directing, and Cumberbatch’s performance,) it actually comes as a surprise. But once Phil’s secret is revealed to us (most tellingly in a scene in which he bathes alone in a secret lagoon, the location of which only he knows,) we begin to see how damaging his attempts to keep this secret to himself have been to his soul. His thorough-going cruelty has been a ruse. He so fears being found out that he has fashioned his own cruelty in order to put everyone off, so they will have no opportunity to discover what kind of man he really is.
Luckily, after turning away from this movie, I wondered why it was getting such glowing attention, most specifically from the Academy Awards nominating process. I looked around the net for articles about it and, to my great fortune, then decided to turn the movie back on. This gave me the pleasure of watching one of the most compelling performances I have seen in film.
Cumberbatch’s handling of Phil Burbank’s terrifying actions and self-loathing becomes astonishing when Phil’s real sympathies are revealed. He has been a very, very bad man, and you forgive him. His change is helped remarkably by Kirsten Dunst’s presentation of Rose’s drinking problem, which reveals so much about the complexity of her worries about her son.
Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Peter, the son, who indeed fascinates Phil, is a teenager, at first a stumbling, insecure boy. But as he learns about Phil’s real feelings, he shows Phil a kind of kindness that, early on in the film, we would never have expected from him. Peter grows as a result of his ultimate sympathy for Phil, and Smit-McPhee’s handling of this delicate role is masterful.
All this, one has to recall, is told in the context of a cattle ranching operation in Montana in 1925. These rough surroundings (made very dangerous for Phil by the homophobic laws of that time) make Phil’s fear of revealing his true self understandable, even as he is at first so loathsome. It is to me remarkable that the Englishman Benedict Cumberbatch, the other actors, and the New Zealander Joan Campion have done so well in making the very American-style conflicts in this film so deeply felt and so engendering of our sympathy.
© Copyright 2022. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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