This movie is so beautiful it hurts. The acting is terrific, the story is brilliant, and the music is exquisite.

The Power Of The Dog is the rarest of things, the perfect movie. There is nothing about it that didn’t knock my socks off.

Everything about this movie – all of the parts – comes together in a dazzling whole.

The acting, the story, the cinematography, the music, the ending all work beautifully.

Ambitious and expensive creative enterprises are complicated because there are so many elements that must come together in perfect sync for the film to work.

Jane Campion (who wrote the script)  seems to have a genius for pulling gifted people together and letting them go. I also appreciate her directness and respect for the moviegoer. The music and story never manipulate or trick us.

Everything is out in the open, just like the frontier itself. She isn’t afraid to let us figure things out by ourselves, and she tells us everything we need to know to do that.

There are no tricks, little is hidden. It’s an incredibly honest movie.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this movie when I first heard about it. There’s enough cruelty and darkness in our world at the moment that I didn’t think I needed more.

I was wrong. I’m so glad I saw it.

I will see this movie two or three times because there is way too much brilliant work to catch and absorb in one sitting.

The western frontier foundation myth is one of America’s most important stories, setting the stage for generations of men who aspired to the domination, brutality, and violence practiced by the so-called heroes of the American frontier.

From Davy Crockett to Clint Eastwood, this is the myth that has defined American visions of manhood and toughness and rejected or ridiculed empathy and compassion – this is Donald Trump’s personal myth in many ways.

The ghosts of these stories haunt us every day; just look at the news.

Campion takes direct aim at this foundational myth – the macho man, the John Wayne, and Gary Coopers of our mythology.

Campion painted a bullseye on the story of the Macho Man and blew it all to bits. In Jane Campion’s West, her first movie in more than a decade, a vicious cowboy meets his surprising match.

This was a bold and very ambitious undertaking for  Campion, one of the most respected directors in the world. She admits in interviews that taking on the Alpha Male was essential to her; they have caused so many women so much harm.

They are difficult to work with.

They aren’t doing the world much good either.

Her target isn’t so much about history as it is the American idea of masculinity if you can separate the two.

These are the forerunners of the men who torment and harass women and turn on every kind of sensitive man. They are the bullies, the ones who definite masculinity. They are often cruel and uncaring, dismissing or demeaning those who are different.

I think their long and brutal reign is ending. I’m not sure this movie could or would have been made even 20 years ago. We are ready for it.

The movie is far more timely than I imagined. The Alpha Male – the film’s actual subject –  is what Donald Trump so urgently wants to be but can never be. He isn’t strong or brave, he could never sleep on a blanket in the desert; he talks tough, but he never lives tough.

He hid from his war callup.  The Macho Men never ran from a fight.

The Alpha Male has been in trouble in our country for some years now; women can’t stand him any longer and are fighting back with ferocity. Campion picked the right time to tell this story.

I don’t know what was in Jane Campion’s mind when she decided to make this movie, but The Story Of A Dog made me think long and hard about what courage really is, and what cruelty really is, and how it is long past time for us to re-consider both.

I guess we already are.

The movie centers on Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a rancher from Montana and a Yale Graduate (majored in classics, says his brother proudly), and who is now a tortured, repressed, and cruel cowboy and Alpha Man.

Since graduating college, Phil has been playing cowboy, memorializing a dead friend named Bronco who he says taught him everything he knows and saved his life. He talks about him all the time to his adoring cowhands.

At one point, he confesses to Peter that Bronco saved f his life by sleeping next to him, body to body,  during a bitter storm.

“Naked?” asks Peter. Phil doesn’t reply.

Phil refuses to bathe, castrates bull calves with his teeth, plays the banjo on dark and lonely nights. He lives and works with his brother George (Jesse Plemons).

For 25 years, Phil and George have kept the macho ethic of the cowboy alive on their remote Montana farm (the movie was filmed in New Zealand.) They break horses, corral cattle, wander the plains, frolic naked in ponds,  and live in the macho and mythical world of the American cowboy.

Phil and George retreat to their dark wood-paneled mansion; they sleep next to one another in adjoining beds. It is Campion’s way of shocking us and getting our attention. It doesn’t seem to mean much.

Campion captures the myth of the unspoiled West more skillfully than any movie I’ve ever seen: the swirling dust, thundering cattle, beautiful mountain ranges, every shot in the film is breathtakingly beautiful.

The gorgeous filmmaking never stops, neither does the haunting and lonely score, which seems to have been written with each character in the film in mind. The music changes with each scene and sets a beautiful and haunting tone.

Every shot made me stop and say, wow, and ask how anyone takes so many beautiful pictures. In this film, nature and the landscape are stars, not backgrounds.

Phil, who calls his gentler brother “Fatso” throughout the movie, finds his life upended when George suddenly marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow with an effeminate and brooding son Peter (Kodi-Smit-McPhee).

Phil sees Rose as a threat and an opportunist and tries to stop the marriage. He fails and tortures Rose into drinking heavily and falling apart. He tags Peter as a sissy, or worse.

Weak brother George can’t or won’t stop him. Rose is very much alone.

Phil has a painful secret, one he has lived with all of his life and will go to almost any length to protect. He seems to be driving himself mad with his new family structure. The presence of Rose is beginning to undo him and shatter the life he has so obsessively preserved and protected. We begin to see the cracks in the wall.

At this point, the movie zeroes in on Campion’s real target. We are heading into liberation territory, a not unfamiliar theme these days, but no one has done it nearly as gracefully or skillfully as Campion.

Campion forces us to think, perhaps for the first time, about the courage and masculinity of the men who set out to conquer the American plains and about what masculinity is. In her view, the soft and the shy can be quite strong and very tough. And the strong can be weak.

When George marries Rose, he brings her into the home lair of Phil, who calls her a thief and a schemer the first time they talk. Phil will now have to live with Rose and her quiet, creepy, but oddly confident teenage son Peter, or get rid of both of them.

Kodi Smit-McPhee does a beautiful job of portraying this shy and effeminate young man, a magnet for the cruel teasing of Phil and the ranch hands, yet someone who surprises with his strength and dignity –  it silences them and reminds Phil of his late friend Bronco.

Campion’s characters are complex, I had to work some to figure them out, and I loved having to do that. It engaged me with the movie in a very rare and powerful way. I’ve never had to think that much about Captain America.

One literary critic pointed out that with the arrival of Rose and Peter, the story almost becomes a female Gothic, one of those bone-chilling English stories about women in suffocating domestic spaces haunted by ghosts. In  Jane Eyre, the heroine enters a home with a madwoman whose husband has locked her in the attic.

Rose seems headed for this fate.

Phil stalks Rose in the cruelest ways and she soon begins to fall apart, drinking herself nearly to death. The stakes for both of them are high. If Rose survives him, she would most likely be more powerful than he was.  The whole closely guarded structure of his life would fall apart. Phil is very smart, he knows how to undo and undermine her, mostly through threatening her son.

He befriends the boy, thinking to unravel Rose, but the boy is more than he bargained for. Phil begins to think of him as his beloved  Bronco. Peter knows what he is doing.

When Rose defies Peter’s orders and gives some Native-Americas the cowhides that he was about to burn, (he left strict orders that they never be given to the Indians, even though he has no use for them), he exploded with rage and fury. This was a critical moment for her, the first time she had challenged him so directly. The Native Americans gave her some clothes in return and when her husband tried to take them off of her hands (she had collapsed), she refused to let him.

Both she and Phil understood this was only the beginning of her challenge to his primacy and authority. George would never be able to take his brother on. He starts to lose control of himself.

I should say that the movie opens with the voice of Peter saying any son must protect his mother. That one line kept me on my toes; Campion quite clearly wanted me to remember it. Peter doesn’t say much in the film.

I should also say that the movie is not violent or (apart from a bull castration) gory in any way. The Power Of The Dog is not, In my mind, even a dark movie, although some critics thought otherwise.

The beauty and acting and intensity of the actors and story kept me deeply engrossed.

It is simply a fantastic movie, as good a movie in every way as people who love movies are ever likely to see or have seen. And it moves like a bullet train. It’s two hours long, but I would have loved two hours more.

If you like movies at all, you might want to see or stream this one more than once. I sense it is already a cult movie, one of the world’s ten best films for many years.

I should also add that The Power Of The Dog is based on a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, a closeted gay man whose fiction was inspired by his early years living and working on a Montana ranch.

The book is a fictional story of the West and was mostly ignored when it was published.

In an afterword to the book written for a reprint by the writer Annie Proulx, she observes that “something aching and lonely and terrible of the west is caught forever” in Savage’s novel. (The book predates by a generation Proulx’s tragic love story “Brokeback Mountain,” about two hired cowboys, Jack and Ennis, who discover each other in 1963 while herding sheep, have sex and fall in love while convincing themselves they are safe and “invisible.”)

Perhaps nothing the western Alpha Male feared and hated more than anything was any sign or whiff of homosexuality. Phil goes into a rage at the very sight of Peter, who he declares with contempt is a “nancy,” or a “pansy,” in cowboy language.

Phil is unspeakably cruel; his brother  George is unrelentingly shy and weak.

Those who pay attention must know by now that almost every American woman alive has been demeaned, molested, abused, or patronized by one or more men in her life. We’ve paid less attention to the fact that many men and boys were and are beaten and demeaned by the very same Alpha Males.

The guys don’t have a MeToo movement yet. When they do, it will turn the world upside down. The Alpha Males are vulnerable, after all.

Phil had Peter crying the first time they met, setting fire to one of his paper table flowers.

Campion helps to change the narrative.

The movie is lovely, and I won’t tip off the ending, which surprised me on several levels. Although there are many clues towards the end. Campion plays it fairly; she’s not looking to trick or fool anybody.

I’ve just never seen anything like this movie before.

She challenges us to think about strength and masculinity once we get close to it and break through the walls. Maria and I talked about this movie for much of the night and into the morning.

One of the many things I appreciated about The Story Of The Dog is that it builds tremendous force as it moves along.

The music and the landscapes reinforce and define and support the story at every turn.

The story is a tragedy, liberation, and penetrating exploration of masculinity and feminity. Campion has taken on the great American myth and blown it right out of the prairie.

In the era of the Superhero, sometimes entertaining but never ever moving, this movie will grab you by the heart and refuse to let go.