It seems that Campion has chosen to take a more anthropological approach for many aspects of this film, especially in order to render the immensity of the landscape, a key metaphor in the film. Exquisitely lit compositions, pockets of shadows, and light playfully caressing details in the frame. However, uncomfortably, the film danced back and forth between being a painterly study of historical Montana and an intensely intimate portrait of a group of characters bound by self-loathing. Benedict Cumberbatch's performance (who is a greedy presence on screen and mostly unbelievable as the Alpha to a group of uniformly cliched dopey cowboy extras) and Campion's point of view shifts our focus to something more intensely psychological for the sequences surrounding his character.
Campion sets Cumberbatch up as a predator, not unlike Mitchum in "Night of the Hunter". Even the atonal contemporary score and percussive sound design speak to the pretension of the film's ruse to play with the suspense genre as it dances uncomfortably between Dunst's and Cumberbatch.
But the real evolving story between Cumberbatch's character is with Dunst's effeminate medical student son. This relationship is more a projection but the scenes' details are malformed, full of important emotional gaps, and lacking any plausibility. They feel Campion's homophobic ciphers, allegories for the homosexual "condition", bargaining on the future of civilisation, and the safety of women.
The narrative dislocation between the two men speaks to a lack of care by Campion for the film's two central male characters -- the repressed homosexual played by Cumberbatch and the sociopathic modern queer son of Kirsten Dunst -- who will kill anything that dares to threaten his mother.
Perhaps it's Campion's big #METOO statement on bullying.
I wondered who she ultimately cares for in this film if not just Kirsten Dunst's Rose -- and poor husband George (played wonderfully by Jesse Plemons).
This is a chess game of dislocated identities, broken people, mounted in an exquisitely distant production. The characters were all victims but I feel like the history lesson lacked any genuine empathy, the characters were so rigid in their malnourished identity. The film was problematic for me as a film about male identity for the 21st century, which seems to have homosexuals turning on their own because of their own internalised homophobia. What does she mean to say? And yet the world she depicts in this film has no threat to either of them, the cowboys surrounding Cumberbatch are goofy and supplicating. The only danger comes from themselves. And Campion doesn't care to portray any complex humanity here in terms of them learning to feel remorse -- Our modern queer has no regrets for the broken man, only to protect the bosom of his mother. It's a sadly reductive set of cliches, the homosexual reduced to either a misogynist bully or a sociopathic pansy.
Campion sets Cumberbatch up as a predator, not unlike Mitchum in "Night of the Hunter". Even the atonal contemporary score and percussive sound design speak to the pretension of the film's ruse to play with the suspense genre as it dances uncomfortably between Dunst's and Cumberbatch.
But the real evolving story between Cumberbatch's character is with Dunst's effeminate medical student son. This relationship is more a projection but the scenes' details are malformed, full of important emotional gaps, and lacking any plausibility. They feel Campion's homophobic ciphers, allegories for the homosexual "condition", bargaining on the future of civilisation, and the safety of women.
The narrative dislocation between the two men speaks to a lack of care by Campion for the film's two central male characters -- the repressed homosexual played by Cumberbatch and the sociopathic modern queer son of Kirsten Dunst -- who will kill anything that dares to threaten his mother.
Perhaps it's Campion's big #METOO statement on bullying.
I wondered who she ultimately cares for in this film if not just Kirsten Dunst's Rose -- and poor husband George (played wonderfully by Jesse Plemons).
This is a chess game of dislocated identities, broken people, mounted in an exquisitely distant production. The characters were all victims but I feel like the history lesson lacked any genuine empathy, the characters were so rigid in their malnourished identity. The film was problematic for me as a film about male identity for the 21st century, which seems to have homosexuals turning on their own because of their own internalised homophobia. What does she mean to say? And yet the world she depicts in this film has no threat to either of them, the cowboys surrounding Cumberbatch are goofy and supplicating. The only danger comes from themselves. And Campion doesn't care to portray any complex humanity here in terms of them learning to feel remorse -- Our modern queer has no regrets for the broken man, only to protect the bosom of his mother. It's a sadly reductive set of cliches, the homosexual reduced to either a misogynist bully or a sociopathic pansy.