The power of prose behind Oscar frontrunner ‘The Power of the Dog’

Editor’s note: This story contains spoilers for Jane Campion’s Oscar-nominated film “The Power of the Dog.”

Jane Campion has made a fine film in “The Power of the Dog,” originally a novel by Thomas Savage. Nominated for 12 Academy Awards, the film is favorited to win best picture and best director on Sunday.

Equally commendable are the novel and a biography of Savage, which assess the toll taken by closeted sexuality in small-town America. Like “Brokeback Mountain,” “The Power of the Dog” is “a queer neo-Western.” It is prompting caustic commentary.

Actor Sam Elliott, the gravel-voiced narrator of “The Big Lebowski,” complained that “allusions of homosexuality” taint the film. Elliott lobbed a volley of f-bombs in an interview, absurdly comparing the film’s actors to Chippendales dancers.

In both the film and novel, Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a Montana rancher. He is also a bigot and a bully. He insults and browbeats his brother, George (Jesse Plemons), who runs the ranch with him, and George’s wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst).

George blindsides Phil by marrying the recent widow and bringing her and her son to live on the ranch. Her sensitive and effeminate son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) makes paper flowers and serves in the restaurant his mother runs. Phil torments him, as well.

In a clever cinematic sleight-of-hand, director Campion makes Phil both protagonist and antagonist. The late “Bronco” Henry never appears in the film, but in an extraordinary scene, Phil is seen erotically fondling a monogrammed scarf that Henry left behind.

Whether Henry was Phil’s lover, or just a fantasy he groomed in ferny solitude, matters little. The scene echoes the end of “Brokeback Mountain,” where Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) passionately seizes the shirt of his deceased lover Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal).

Once Peter ingratiates himself to Phil, the bully of a rancher becomes a mentor. He takes the young man under his wing and shows him the ins and outs of ranch life.

The life of Savage began in Dillon, Mont. Raised there by his mother and stepfather, he moved east for college. He wed his sweetheart, fathered three children, wrote 13 novels – and had an adulterous homosexual affair that threatened to disintegrate his household. His wife stood beside him during and after their ordeal.

One of Elliott’s petty complaints is that Campion shot the film in New Zealand rather than Montana. Visiting Montana for preproduction and research, Campion met professor Alan Weltzien, who has spent his career in Dillon where Savage lived.

Weltzien’s biography “Savage West” notes that “Brokeback Mountain” author Annie Proulx dubbed Phil Burbank “a vicious bitch.” In the spat that followed Elliott’s comments, Campion used that same epithet for Elliott himself, spelling it out instead of uttering it.

“I’m sorry to say it, but he’s not a cowboy. He’s an actor,” Campion said. Moreover, “the West is a mythic space, and there’s a lot of room on the range.” “Room on the range,” echoing “home on the range,” got laughs at the Directors Guild of America Awards.

Some pundits object to the film’s depiction of “toxic masculinity.” Those pundits do not understand that that’s how Savage depicted Phil and his ranch hands.

In novel after novel, Savage returned to his childhood and young adulthood. Those landscapes include southwestern Montana and central Idaho. “In his fiction,” Weltzien writes, “ranches wreck people and small towns often do as well.” Ranch life comes close to wrecking Peter and Rose when they struggle to share a house with Phil.

Weltzien presents an extended lament that Savage has been reduced to a “footnote in American literary history.” He admires Savage and his “queer-inflected” West. The film amplifies those inflections in key scenes besides the one with the scarf.

Peter, intuiting a gay undercurrent in Phil and his crusty ranch hands, manipulates them like tools to save his mother from her brute of a brother-in-law. In a key scene, Peter draws taunts from a band of cowboys who are having their lunch outdoors.

The 25-year-old Australian actor, nominated for an Academy Award for the film, said he “embodied the idea that a fox might be similar in its characteristics to Peter.”

When he was 12, Smit-McPhee worked alongside Viggo Mortensen in “The Road.” He admires Mortensen (who is a frequent presence in nearby Sandpoint), for “how he carries himself offscreen and how he participates in the industry.”

Gender tensions in small-town America are savagely real. Consider gay student Matthew Shepard, in Laramie, Wyo. Beaten and tortured, he languished for six days in a hospital before he died on Oct. 12, 1998. Two male perpetrators were arrested, tried and convicted.

All apart from the flap over its delicate gender dynamics, “The Power of the Dog” is a winner in our household. The film is worthy of multiple Academy Awards. Produced by Netflix, it is available on that video streaming service.

Paul Lindholdt, a professor of English at Eastern Washington University, most recently published the books “Making Landfall” and “The Spokane River.”