Jane Campion – Movie Musings

Searing emotion, passions and fascinating enigmas abound in Campion’s brilliant landmark masterpiece

Director: Jane Campion

Cast: Holly Hunter (Ada McGrath), Harvey Keitel (George Baines), Sam Neill (Alisdair Stewart), Anna Paquin (Flora McGrath), Kerry Walker (Aunt Morag), Genevieve Lemon (Nessie), Tungia Baker (Hira), Ian Mune (Reverend), Peter Dennett (Head seaman), Cliff Curtis (Mana)

What’s really striking about The Piano is how literary it feels, despite the fact it’s an entirely original cinematic work. Every moment of Campion’s intelligent, beautifully constructed, often enigmatic and unreadable film feels like it has been plucked from the pages of a lost Booker Prize winner. Juggling themes of feminism and sexual awakening alongside colonial and masculine thinking, it’s a richly beautiful film awash with superb performances and a heightened, literary reality buried inside a film grounded in the mud and squalor of reality. It remains Campion’s finest achievement.

Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) and her nine-year-old daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) arrive on the coast of nineteenth-century New Zealand. Having refused to speak since the age of six, Ada communicates through sign language and the precocious Flora. Silent in person, her treasured piano gives her a voice and allows her to express passions she otherwise keeps carefully controlled. Ada is to marry landowner Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill), but he baulks at carrying the huge piano from the shore to his home through the forest. Instead, it falls into the possession of neighbour George Baines (Harvey Keitel). George, besotted with Ada, offers her the chance to earn it back one key at a time, in return for allowing him to “do things” while she plays it in his house. The arrangement leads to a complex, sexual love triangle between Ada, George and Alisdair that will see passions explode.

I wonder sometimes if The Piano is a bit of a problem for some campaigners today. You can discover plenty of retrospective reviews that find it hard to mask their disappointment that the film doesn’t offer a more pointed condemnation of its two male characters. Many want The Piano to show Ada rejecting Alisdair as a repressed potential rapist and George as a manipulative sexual predator. But Campion is telling a far more nuanced, feminist story than this easy-to-swallow structure. The Piano is not about pigeon-holing people into easily definable roles. Rather it looks at how unexpected bonds can rise and how darker, deeper passions can flair in unexpected ways.

Because George’s at-first manipulative, outrageous offer actually awakens something unexpected in Ada. George is perfectly played by Keitel as outwardly a lump of inarticulate, labouring flesh but inwardly far more sensitive and strangely poetic – and his desire is based as much on a curious romantic longing and a sensitive fear of rejection. His requests are often based around the briefest of physical touches, the desire to see Ada’s shoulders and legs. He’s timid, shy and becomes increasingly open about his feelings for her.

Even more strikingly, Ada discovers that (after initial shock) she enjoys the bartering negotiation of the arrangement (offering more in-depth contact for a higher number of keys) and finds her ability to provoke desire in George both sexually liberating and exciting. So much so that, when George ends the arrangement (recognising that he cannot get what he really wants – Ada’s love – as long as it stands), her reaction is one of anger, more like a spurned lover, then a relieved victim.

This simmering desire is at the heart of Campion’s passionate work. Rewatching it’s striking how vital touch is in the film, how much it is linked to emotional and sexual connection. Campion focuses in extreme close-up on George stroking Ada’s skin through a tiny hole in her stockings – to her initial shock and increased pleasure. The slightest contact of hands between these two carries an emotional and sensual charge. It’s exactly the lack of this that becomes impossible not to notice in the relationship between Ada and Alisdair. Contact between them is minimal and when it occurs it carries darker meanings: most obviously the impotent, frustration Alisdair half-heartedly uses with Ada, then in the rain-soaked fury he will unleash when her betrayal is revealed.

Ada increasingly uses touch to control. She caresses and strokes Alisdair’s naked body at night – never allowing him to touch her in return – both to manipulate him but also, partly, to satisfy her own newly-discovered itch for sexual power, just as she grew to give herself over totally to the hold she had over George. Dressed in restrictive black, that covers almost her whole body, The Piano is about a flowering of a newly confident and sexually awakened woman from a repressed shell.

The language of the body ties into this. Campion reverses the expectations of nudity. Instead, it’s the male form of George we first – and almost predominantly – see. It turns this physically imposing man into someone vulnerable and sensitive. Like a romantic lover, he cleans the piano naked. He will reveal his body to Ada with shyness. When they first make love, he focuses on her pleasure rather than his own. He contrasts with the stiff-backed Alisdair, trapped in his formal clothes (compared to George’s indigenous tattoos and garments) who, even when Ada seduces him, uncomfortably tries to pull his trousers up over his bare buttocks.

Alisdair – superbly played by Sam Neill in a challenging role – is not a bad man, just a deeply unimaginative, repressed and self-satisfied one. He sees a woman’s duty as wife and nothing else. Just as he can only see the Māori on the land around them as simple savages, clinging to naïve superstitions (he cannot understand why they do not wish to sell or farm the land their ancestors are buried on), so he can find no common ground with Ada. He’s even subconsciously aware the piano is a means of emotional expression she refuses to share with him, causing him to do everything he can to remove it from his house with the same loathing he would have for a rival. But he’s also a timid, needy soul – witnessing George and Ada coupling, he watches from his concealment with a curious mix of envy, longing and sadness at something he will never have.

The Piano places Ada at the centre of this complex junction of feelings and emotions. Played with awards-laden brilliance (including the Oscar) by Holly Hunter, this is a woman who never speaks but whose complex emotional journey is always clear. Stubborn, difficult and demanding, we learn this is defence mechanism against a world she has so cut herself off from, so much so she has literally refused to speak for decades. Her piano is the only outlet she allows herself in a world with strict rules for women. Finding something alternative to this is a frightening and alluring prospect.

It’s one not necessarily understood by her daughter Flora (a brilliant Oscar-winning performance by Anna Paquin) who is so precocious in some ways – forcefully communicating her mother’s wishes – and so young in others. Flora understands little – with fateful consequences – of the emotional and sexual tangles around her and, like a child, often accepts the path of least resistance. She also sees the strong bond between mother and daughter as threatened by the presence of George – in a way she cannot comprehend, even after spying their intimacy together.

Campion’s film superbly ties these literary themes into a film of complex enigma and aching beauty (it’s beautifully filmed by Andrew McAlpine). The film is aided enormously in its emotional charge by the radiantly lyrical score by Michael Nyman (his distinctive sound makes the film sound like the finest film Peter Greenaway never made). The Piano offers challenging, thought-provoking and intriguing scenes at every turn, powered by a brilliant script and wonderful performances. Avoiding the obvious, it’s power and reputation has rightly only grown in the decades since its filming.

Benedict Cumberbatch rules his ranch with an iron fist in Jane Campion’s extraordinary The Power of the Dog

Director: Jane Campion

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch (Phil Burbank), Kirsten Dunst (Rose Gordon), Jesse Plemons (George Burbank), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Peter Gordon), Thomasin McKenzie (Lola), Genevieve Lemon (Mrs Lewis), Keith Carradine (Governor Edward), Frances Conroy (Old Lady), Peter Carroll (Old Gent)

At one point in The Power of the Dog, Phil Burbank, monstrously domineering Montana Rancher, stares out at his beloved hills. Where others see only rocks and peaks, Phil sees how (like a cloud) they form themselves into looking like a howling dog. Seeing things others do not is something Phil prides himself on. It’s also something The Power of the Dog excels out: it’s a continually genre- and tone-shifting film that starts as a gothic, du Maurier-like dance among the plains and ends as something so radically different, with such unexpected character shifts and revelations, you’ll be desperate to go back and watch it again and see if you can see the image of a dog among its rocks.

In Montana in 1925, two brothers run a ranch. George (Jesse Plemons) is polite, formal and quiet, seemingly under the thumb of his aggressively macho, bullying brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). Phil is fully “hands-on” on the ranch, priding himself on being able to perform every task, from rope weaving to bull skinning, all of which he learned from his deceased mentor “Bronco” Henry. Things change though when George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst). Phil takes an immediate dislike to Rose, engaging into a campaign of psychological bullying that drives Rose to drink. However, at the same time a strange bond develops between Phil and Rose’s student son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) – is Phil’s interest in the boy part of a campaign to destroy Rose or are there other forces at work?

Campion’s film (her first in over ten years) is a fascinating series of narrative turns and genre shifts. It opens like a gothic Western. The ranch is a huge, isolated house surrounded by rolling fields and its own rules. Phil is an awe-inspiring, still-living Rebecca with Rose a Second Mrs de Winter having to share a bathroom with the perfect first wife. The psychological war Phil launches against Rose, like a hyper-masculine Mrs Danvers, seems at first to be heading towards a plot where we will see a vulnerable woman either crushed or fighting back. Then Campion shifts gears with incredible professional ease; the kaleidoscope shifts and suddenly our perceptions change along with the film’s genre, which becomes something strikingly different.

This all revolves around the character of Phil. Excellently played (way against type) by Benedict Cumberbatch, in a hugely complex performance, Phil at first seems an obvious character. A bully and alpha male who mocks George as “Fatso”, hurls homophobic slurs at Rose’s sensitive, artistic son and would-be doctor Pete, and treats his duties with such masculine reverence that the idea of wearing gloves to skin a cow or washing the dirt of his labour from him is anathema.

But look at Phil another way and you see his vulnerability. The opening scenes play as a torrent of abuse to George. But look again and you see this is a man desperately trying multiple angles to clumsily engage his brother in joint reminiscences. His emotional dependence on George is so great that they still share a single bedroom in their giant house (and even a bed in a guest house, like Morecambe and Wise) and he weeps on their first night apart. Despite his brutish appearance, his conversation is littered with classical and literary allusions (we discover later he is a Yale Classics graduate). His life is devoid of emotional and physical contact and he maintains a hidden retreat in the woods, a private den the only place we see him relax.

He’s a man clinging desperately to the past. At first it feels like he has never grown up, that he is still a boy at heart. But Campion slowly reveals his emotional bonds to his deceased mentor Bronco (whom he refers to almost constantly in conversation) to be far deeper and more complex than first anticipated. He treats Bronco’s remaining belongings with reverence, maintaining a shrine to him in the barn and cleaning his saddle with more tenderness and care than he feels able to show any human being. The depths of this relationship are crucial to understanding Phil’s character and the emotional barriers he has constructed. His gruff aggression hides a deep isolation and loneliness, feelings Campion explores with profound empathy in the film’s second half.

That doesn’t change the monstrousness of the bullying Phil enacts on Rose. Played with fragile timidity by Kirsten Dunst, Rose becomes so grimly aware of Phil’s loathing that is too paralysed by intimidation to even play Strauss on her newly purchased piano in front of George’s distinguished guests (Phil pointedly plays the music far better on his banjo and takes to whistling in in Rose’s presence) and later tips into alcoholic incoherence.

Despite Dunst’s strong performance, if the film has a flaw it is that we don’t quite invest in Rose enough to empathise fully with her emotional collapse. Both she and George (a fine performance of not-too-bright-decency from Plemons, in the least flashy role) disappear for stretches and play out parts of their relationship off camera, making it harder to bond with them (a bond the earlier part of the film needs). It perhaps might have been more effective to centre the film’s opening act on Rose rather than Phil, allowing us to relate to her better and feel her decline more.

Dunst however nails Rose’s growing fear, desperation and depression while her status as an unwelcome guest is constantly forced on her. Her panic only deepens with the return of her son Peter. This is where the film takes a series of unexpected shifts. To the surprise of all Phil offers to take the sensitive, quiet Pete under his wing: perhaps he’s impressed by Pete’s indifference to the homophobic abuse from the ranch-hands, perhaps he sees a chance to spiritually resurrect his mentor by playing the same role himself to Phil (pointedly, the film implies the younger Phil may not have been dissimilar from Pete). Either way, Campion’s film heads into its extraordinary and deeply impactful second half as an unsettling and uncertain personal drama between two men who seem totally different but may perhaps have more similarities than expected.

As Peter, Kodi Smit-McPhee gives a wonderfully judged performance of inscrutability and reserve. He’s an artistic boy who creates detailed paper flowers and keeps artistic scrapbooks, but can dissect animals without a flinch and snaps the neck of an injured rabbit with ease. He seems alternately devoted to his mother then queasily distant from her, calling her Rose and unsettled by her drunken inappropriateness. His motivations remain enigmatic, just as Phil’s motivations for befriending this isolated and very different boy could fall either way. Smit-McPhee and Cumberbatch are both extraordinarily good in the scenes between this unlikely partnership, and Campion’s artful film keeps us on our toes as to precisely what they want from this friendship. The result is haunting.

It leads into a stunning final act which demands we re-evaluate all we have seen and leaves such a lasting impression I was still re-living the film in my mind days later. Campion’s film is masterfully shot and carries a wonderful atmosphere of intimidation and unease, helped hugely by Johnny Greenwood’s brilliant score with its unsettling piano-inspired cadences. It reinvents itself constantly, Campion’s direction shifting tone and genre masterfully. It’s quite brilliantly acted and provides Cumberbatch in particular with an opportunity he seizes upon to slowly reveal depths of emotion and vulnerability an outwardly straight-forward monster. There won’t be many finer films released in 2021: and this will be a classic to sit alongside The Piano in Campion’s work.