It’s film awards season, which means movie lovers and Academy/Screen Actors Guild/Nickelodeon-watching kid voters alike have been busy sorting out the best films from last year.

Many of the most hyped-up contenders of this year’s (or any) film awards season are truly worthy of the honors they seek. Whether it’s because of their unique, high-concept plot, sublime acting performances, perfectly executed action thrills, or some other form of excellence, they deliver on their promises.

And then you have the other films up “for your consideration”—and those that really, really thought they would be. You know the ones I’m talking about. They’re tailor-made to give the appearance of depth, typically through shamelessly grandiose performances, clunky attempts to tackle Big Important Issues, or both. (And possibly a fat suit.) It’s these try-hards for whom the insult “Oscar bait” was first invented.

But in the midst of all this excellence, whether actual or ruthlessly engineered, it’s worth sparing a thought for the supposed lesser films and actors with no hope of taking home a tiny statue this year. These are the movies released on a random Friday in January—the film industry’s de facto “dump month”—or sent straight to streaming jail without even a half-hearted promotional campaign. Or better yet, made completely outside the Hollywood system by amateurs with little more than a camera and a handful of wacky ideas (and the results to show for it). Because if you’re willing to wade through the muck of these kinds of films, you may be pleasantly surprised by what they can teach us—not about badness, but instead about what passes for “good.”

For my money, there’s no better teacher than the cult film The Room, a 2003 cinematic catastrophe I find so fascinating that I edited a whole book of essays about it. Written, directed, starred in, financed, and produced by Tommy Wiseau, an untrained filmmaker of ambiguous Eastern European origins and means, The Room was supposed to be a deeply affecting story of a love triangle gone wrong. That was the intention, at least. The result, however, is a movie that is legendarily terrible: terribly shot, terribly written, and, most infamously, terribly, terribly acted.

Without even addressing the plot, or lack thereof, it’s easy to tick off the nearly infinite problems there are with The Room. Continuity is non-existent: one character announces, willy-nilly, that she has breast cancer, only for it to never be brought up again; another character disappears completely without explanation, only to be replaced by an entirely different character (also without explanation). Multiple gratuitous sex scenes (four!) go on for several minutes, in a movie that’s barely an hour and a half long. And, most memorably for fans, the dialogue ranges from utterly banal (“If a lot of people loved each other, the world would be a better place to live”) to strange (“Keep your stupid comments in your pocket!”) to downright nonsensical (“My Lisa’s great when I can get it”).

It’s easy—so, so easy—to dismiss The Room as nothing more than a perfect and hilarious example of something “so good it’s bad.” But if you let yourself dig below the (extremely rough) exterior, you’re left with a cultural artifact that reveals the deep-seated pretensions of the film industry. To wit: In its laughably transparent attempt to be taken seriously, it’s an accidental but deeply cutting parody of Oscar bait.

Take the performance of its star, Wiseau, playing the movie’s protagonist, Johnny. It isn’t merely big; it’s gigantic. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” Johnny wails during a mundane argument with his fiancée, gesticulating wildly for even greater melodramatic effect.

Minus the “Lisa,” this is an exact rip-off of a famous James Dean line in Rebel Without a Cause. Dean was one of Wiseau’s idols, and Wiseau’s performance can be seen as part homage to the Hollywood legend, part improvement attempt. Throughout the movie, Wiseau also channels his other idol, Marlon Brando, and his performance as the volatile Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, in particular.

Thanks to Wiseau’s unforgettable performance (and, to be fair, the performances of everyone else), The Room has become the biggest cult movie since The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That’s why fans flock to monthly screenings around the country and the world to gawk, smugly, at Johnny’s impassioned but utterly unconvincing cries. And yet, with The Room, Wiseau is doing, albeit very sloppily, what so much Oscar bait is accused of: trying really, really hard to convey pathos in an attempt to manipulate the viewer into feeling something.

Lacking even the most basic ability to develop plot and character, Wiseau goes all in with a brute force display of emotion. Like most shortcuts, the approach falls utterly flat. The louder Johnny shouts, the more he contorts his face to really show his heartache, the more the audience can’t help but laugh.

Unfortunately, the performances of Dean, Brando, and many recent, talented award nominees can’t just be mimicked for effect. There’s an alchemy to a truly moving performance that goes beyond good writing and acting skill (not that The Room remotely possessed either of those). The viewer usually knows when they’re being had.

It is exactly this Grand Canyon-sized gap between Wiseau’s intention (depicting a riveting domestic drama) and his execution (creating a surreal, seemingly incoherent work of possible outsider art) that makes the movie so “bad,” and thus so compelling. In this respect, The Room is like any other film that aimed so high but landed so low. Just much more so.

There is one important difference, though. Wiseau’s utter sincerity, no matter how absurd the final result, imbues The Room with a kind of authenticity that sets it apart. “You want to be fake? Not me. I hate fake stuff,” he told his crew during filming, according to The Disaster Artist, the 2013 memoir about the making of the film by The Room co-star Greg Sestero (and the inspiration for the 2017 film, also named The Disaster Artist). Indeed, Wiseau had so much faith in the emotional honesty of his work that when The Room was first released, he rented a Laemmle theater in the San Fernando Valley to show it for two weeks—the minimum run required for a movie to be considered for an Oscar.

If recent Oscar acceptance speeches are any gauge, more than a few actors (and directors, writers, and producers) believe they are creating something that transcends the mere label of “entertainment.” Some of them are. But more often than not, their goal is ultimately the same as Wiseau’s: to signal to the viewer that the movie they’re watching is important. Maybe even worthy of a top-flight award.

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Like any great aphorism, the dramatist Anton Chekhov’s advice can be taken many ways. In our 21st century moment of constant and obsessive self-reflection, only exacerbated by the pandemic, the maxim rings truer than ever: Art and Life are not just connected—they reflect, permeate, and imitate one another.

This is great playwriting advice, but you don’t have to be a playwright to get the point. Life demands work if you want it to mean something, just as art demands work if you want it to truly play: that is, to happen in front of us, to engage and connect and challenge and jolt us into receptiveness.

I recently played hooky from work as a live artist to see Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 film Drive My Car. Based on Haruki Murakami’s eponymous short story, Drive My Car won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and has been nominated for four Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture. Like 2020’s Best Picture winner, Parasite, it has the chance to run the table.

But unlike Bong Joon-ho’s masterful cinematic provocation, this film plays on an entirely different strategy, burrowing down to the intertwined roots of its characters’ life and art.

Yūsuke Kafuku, the film’s main character, is an actor/director of international prominence who has a highly particular, even odd, method of staging plays—in this case, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Not only does he seek a multinational company of actors, but he wants them to speak in their own languages. The actors come from all over the Far East. Although English is the default language in rehearsal, individual cast members speak the lines of the play in Mandarin, Korean, Tagalog, and Japanese. The effect is at first blush a headscratcher: How is this going to work for an audience? How are the players supposed to understand one another?

It is not quite as eccentric or exotic as it may seem. Since the middle of the 20th century, multinational companies of actors, dancers, musicians, and others have formed and traveled widely through the Middle East and Africa, Europe and the Americas doing plays that treat audiences as partners in a style that is sometimes called “a walking theater.” Among an array of legendary theater directors working in this style—Grotowski, Serban, Mnouchshkine, LePage— the preeminent practitioner is Peter Brook, known for his work at the International Centre for Theatre Research (CIRT).

Brook—like the film’s main character, named Yūsuke Kafuku—works with great texts, including those by Chekhov. And they both use non-directional directing, wherein an actor discovers on their own, without the director telling them, who or what they are. Rather, the director’s job is to attempt to call forth existing emotions and connections within the actor. As Brook has said repeatedly in discussing his acting and training techniques, “Human connection is the essence of good theater.”

In this style, the theater is not the art of imitation, but the art of suggestion. “A move from one creates a tremor from another; an impulse from a third, an immediate chain reaction,” Brook has said. What is interesting and ultimately of great importance is the relation between one thing and another. For Brook, truth in the theater is always on the move, and people from very different backgrounds can partake, understanding each other and coming together without losing their essential nature. We come to see not only the player but the audience member truly as an individual. The invisible is made visible, and we realize our fundamental humanity beyond surface differences.

Easier said than done. But the exercise of investigating classic texts in this manner has made for some of the great art of the late 20th century, climaxed by Brook’s productions of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Vyasa’s The Mahabharata at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

These were emotional experiences as much as productions. For one thing, they were long; The Mahabharata ran well over five hours. With Chekhov, Brook cleared not only the stage but the entire theater space, leaving only the bare audience seats, thus creating a shell without artifice shared by the actors and the audience. In its 1988 review, the New York Times said: “By banishing all forms of theatrical realism except the only one that really matters—emotional truth—Mr. Brook has found the pulse of a play that its author called ‘not a drama but a comedy, in places almost a farce.’”

In this kind of work, categories fall away.

In the decades since those Brook productions, art has gone in different directions (as it should), and the experience of non-directional theater may well feel foreign for many people. Yet this kind of work creates powerful resonances in 2022, in the midst of our own present moment of polarity, around the world and in our own communities and families. It is harder than ever for us to simply sit together, breathe the same air, and enjoy our interconnectedness.

Our technology sorts us by category, separates our likes and dislikes, anticipates our choice-making based on past purchases and searches, and stresses our peculiar tastes, hermetically sealing us from new or different tastes. Our politics are tribal. Our economy is unbalanced. And nowhere is the wicket stickier than with the question of race.

The stress keeps separating us, striating our heart muscles. And that separation keeps us dependent on surface opinions and judgements of who is with us or against us, and of what is worthy of connection. All the resulting noise of our era leads us to facile conclusions and pat expectations. And so we find it more difficult to receive, harder to breathe, and nearly impossible to reconnect to our intertwining underground roots.

Perhaps that is why Drive My Car feels like an exercise in non-direction. In an age of movies running and trumping one another, this is very much a walking film, full of suggestion, breathing at its own pace, making the invisible visible, and stripping away artificial separations and categorizations. It may tonally be a drama, but it has elements of comedy and farce. It doesn’t tell you how to feel, but it does ask you to walk alongside—or, in this case, ride along in the car.

There is no real reason to do the kind of work Yūsuke Kafuku does, unless you want to learn something new—about yourself and the person sitting next to you, whether you know them or not—and unless you’re willing to let go of the wheel.

Letting go is precisely what happens through much of the film, particularly in the Uncle Vanya rehearsals. The work between the actors has gotten so minimal as to be telepathic. No one is telling them, or us, how the world works or how to feel about it. We are not being talked at. But we are being included directly in the investigation. We have been given license to enter the discussion.

“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” is a Zulu phrase made popular worldwide by the likes of the late Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela in the 1980s and 1990s, as they broke down apartheid in South Africa and strove to forgive the sins of their former oppressors. Although it can be translated many ways, the phrase basically means that a person is a person through other persons: “I am because you are—and since you are, definitely I am.”

Shared aims, shared needs, shared loves, and shared losses. A certain light appears, and something special begins to happen, something we would never have thought of alone, on our own. We live it together.

Putting on a play, writing a short story, making a film, or forgiving the guilty, takes work—lots of it. But when we experience that work as play, then it doesn’t feel like work anymore.

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This question ties together two excellent films—King Richard and Licorice Pizza—that are nominees for best picture at this month’s Academy Awards.

The movies, while different in style, genre, and setting, are both about over-the-top ambition and relentless fame-seeking in Los Angeles County. And each film features a main character whose goals and entrepreneurial schemes are dismissed as madness, even by friends and loved ones.

Indeed, those cinematic hustlers make statements and demands and behave in ways that go beyond what we consider acceptable in today’s neo-Victorian age. They break and bend the law, they showboat, and they mold the truth to their wills. They also ultimately achieve what they want—precisely because of their outrageousness.

The title hustler in King Richard is Richard Williams, the real-life father of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams. Played brilliantly by Will Smith, Williams is living in 1990s Compton, the small, famously tough, working-class city south of South L.A. He works graveyard shifts as a security guard, gets jumped by young gangsters at the local park, and drives around in a beat-up Volkswagen van.

And yet, he has a plan to make his two youngest daughters Wimbledon champions. He is confident enough that he drives them through Beverly Hills and asks them which houses they’ll buy one day. And he never stops trying to convince famous coaches and agents in the very white tennis world to help him.

“We’re not here to rob you. We’re here to make you rich,” he says to one of many tennis types who dismisses his entreaties. Williams usually goes too far, and he never gives an inch. He takes “no” as an invitation to increase his demands—for better coaching, or more money, or support to make his daughters champions.

He works Venus and Serena so hard between homework, church, work (they deliver phone books), and tennis practice (even during rainstorms), that a neighbor calls social services. He shouts the caseworkers out of his home. He rarely bothers to sleep.

“Don’t nothing come to a sleeper but a dream,” he says.

All this behavior could be—and has been—framed as awfulness or even abuse. Williams still has a reputation as a crazy, overbearing father. But his ambitions weren’t dreams—they are realities, and his daughters are two of tennis’ greatest-ever champions.

The male lead in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, set in the San Fernando Valley of 1973, also crosses lines that would get you in trouble today. He is Gary Valentine, a 15-year-old child actor (played by Cooper Hoffman, son of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman) whose pursuit of a 25-year-old named Alana Kane (played by the musician Alana Haim) is awkward, inappropriate, and on occasion verges into what audiences today would call harassment.

But in this film, the teenager’s relentless pursuit—of everything—wins over the young woman, against her better judgment.

The film belongs to Alana, the central character, an audience stand-in, who at first is repulsed by Gary and his come-ons. But she finds she can’t resist his utter shamelessness and constant hustles. Soon they are partners in a business selling water beds—which they pitch with such fervor I almost forgot how hard it is to actually sleep in one.

Gary’s transgressions make life more interesting, and soon Alana finds herself, in disbelief, hanging out with him and his immature but inventive teenage buddies. Then, in one of those can’t-watch-can’t-stop-watching extended scenes that are the director’s forte, Alana finds herself driving a moving truck rapidly down narrow, hilly streets in what looks like Encino.

No scene, and no recent movie, so well captures the pure thrill and connection of recklessness and risk-taking. Licorice Pizza is a movie that celebrates hard falls (Sean Penn has a drunken cameo involving a motorcycle jump) and failures (including a sub-plot involving the unsuccessful 1973 L.A. mayoral bid of Joel Wachs, who, undiscouraged, went on to be a councilman and dealmaker).

The argument here isn’t hard to spot: that craziness is a requirement, if you’re a teenager who wants to open a business, win a TV role, or make that 25-year-old your girlfriend. “I’m a showman,” Gary says, by way of explaining one of his escapades. “That’s what I’m meant to do.”

Licorice Pizza and King Richard are imperfect movies. They both indulge in the same self-mythologizing, too common among Californians, that we are underdogs, just because we aren’t from the fanciest neighborhoods. While the film characters in Compton and the Valley see themselves as outsiders with their noses pressed up against the glass of better-known L.A. precincts, who are they kidding? Both the Valley and Compton have produced more than their share of stars in entertainment and sports over many years. (Witness the Super Bowl halftime show.)

But what both films get right, and what makes them entertaining, are their depictions of what it takes to achieve success in a place like California. This state demands that you cross lines and behave unreasonably. Yes, we have more than our share of rules and regulations, but those exist mostly for show, to give the truly ambitious more things to break on their way up.

Indeed, watching these movies got me thinking about one of the richest Angelenos of my lifetime, the late billionaire Eli Broad. Broad’s wife Edythe famously gave him a paperweight with a George Bernard Shaw quote: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Broad took heart and lived up to Shaw’s words, often causing chaos and conflict in the arts, philanthropy, and the schools by changing his mind and unapologetically making outrageous demands (in service of creating various cultural, scientific, and educational institutions that survive him). And when it came time for Broad to write a book, he titled it The Art of Being Unreasonable.

You might say that that’s California’s highest art form.

The post The Outrageous California Hustlers of <i>King Richard</i> and <i>Licorice Pizza</i> appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What possessed writer-director Aaron Sorkin—a man who’s openly stated that I Love Lucy is “not a show … we’d think was funny” today—to make a film that dramatizes a week of the sitcom’s production is a mystery. Sitting through the biopic, though, I thought back to the “Scary Lucy” situation with new sympathy. Suddenly I understood the frustration of feeling Lucy’s image was being shaped by the wrong hands.

It also got me thinking about why—amid a spate of new Lucy content, including the Amy Poehler-directed documentary Lucy and Desi and even Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, which inserts “Lucille Doolittle,” a Ball composite character, into its 1970s San Fernando Valley coming-of-age story—we’re still having a hard time getting the “real” Lucy right today.

Ball, born Lucille Désirée Ball on August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York, lived multiple lives as a model, showgirl, and “queen of B-movies” before the success of her CBS Radio comedy My Favorite Husband led the network to invite her to develop the show for television. Ball famously agreed—so long as she could play opposite her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz.

The result, ultimately, was I Love Lucy, one of the most watched and influential television shows of all time.

While Lucy Ricardo is beloved for her hijinks and heart, it’s easy to forget that Ball’s character was also emblematic of the changing role of the American housewife in the postwar era. In 1951, when the sitcom debuted, women who’d entered the nation’s workforce during World War II were being pushed out of it and into the suburbs.

“She’s a transitional figure—she’s on the cutting edge,” said Leslie Feldman, a professor of political science at Hofstra University and author of The Political Theory of I Love Lucy.

Ricky constantly dashes Lucy’s dreams of becoming an actress, beginning in the pilot episode where he tells her, “I want my wife to be a wife, I want you to bring my slippers when I go back home, prepare my dinner, and raise my children.” But throughout the show’s six-season run—where it never left the top three in weekly ratings—Lucy pushed back, enacting various harebrained antics, with the help of neighbors Ethel and Fred Mertz, to become a star.

She’s often successful: When the Ricardos go to Hollywood, MGM offers Lucy a contract; when they go to England, the Queen herself requests to “meet the lady that did the comical dancing.” But each time Lucy gets a taste of fame, she’s put in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between her career and her family.

This struggle “represents the conflict of women in the second half of the 20th century,” said Feldman. “Are they going to stay home and be wives and mothers? Are they going to go to work? Or are they going to do both? And what if they really do better and earn more money than their husbands? What about that? That’s an element of Lucy, too.”

The real Lucille Ball faced these same questions. Ball was 40 years old when she started filming I Love Lucy, and she’d devoted herself to her career. “She was very serious-minded, and an incredibly hard worker,” said biographer Kathleen Brady, adding that Ball was the “first to say she was a workaholic.” On the other hand, family was extremely important to her, and growing up in the Great Depression, she had a traditional view of how that dynamic worked. “Certainly, her idea was that women cater to the men, wives cater to the husbands,” said Brady.

What Lucy Ricardo achieved on the show—a happy home and family life—is what Lucille Ball wanted off screen. But her great success as an actress, a comedian, and later, a businesswoman came at a personal toll.

A tribute paid to Ball by actor and comedian Taylor Negron, who’d enrolled in a comedy class she taught in the late 1970s, speaks to this. “Lucy paid a heavy price for fame; she knew its depthless, lonely suspension,” he wrote in “The Pink Gorilla (Tuesdays with Lucy),” a moving reflection on the eight-weeks he spent learning from her at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental Film School. But it was this insight into the human condition, he argued, that gave her comedy so much depth. “Lucy was a realist who made the world a happier place to be in because she mocked the sadness in her life,” he wrote.

“Scary Lucy” statue in Celoron, New York. Courtesy of Adam Moss/ CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The public did not see much of that sadness. Throughout her life, Ball worked hard to shape her image, something instilled in her by the Hollywood studio system she rose up in.

“She wanted to present her best self, and she felt this was an obligation,” said Brady, the biographer. While as Lucy Ricardo she was fine wearing a fright wig and blackening her teeth, as Lucille Ball, she spent hours in makeup and hair. She also went to personal expense to respond to every fan request that came her way. “She took the love of the public seriously,” said Brady. “I think she always knew it could go away in a minute.”

Because of this, Brady believes that in this recent slate of Lucille Ball biographical work, the star would likely approve of the Poehler documentary, Lucy and Desi, the most, calling it a “valentine” to Ball and Arnaz’s relationship.

It replays the tale “we want to know—that Lucy and Desi always loved each other, and that this was a great love story,” Brady said. But, of course, that’s only part of the truth: “There were years,” she said, “where they genuinely and truly hated each other.”

Both Lucy and Desi and Being the Ricardos chose to write about Ball through her relationship with Arnaz. But the story of their partnership isn’t the only narrative around Ball to tell. Lucy and Desi, in fact, offered a tantalizing glimpse into another account of the star that one day I hope gets its own feature treatment. That’s her relationship with I Love Lucy co-star Viviane Vance, specifically during the era they starred together in The Lucy Show.

The sitcom debuted in 1962, the year that a recently divorced Ball reluctantly bought Arnaz’s interest in their production company Desilu. In The Lucy Show, she and Vance reunite on screen as two single women making a go of it together. The show is the first to feature a divorced woman (Vance’s character) on primetime television, just as off camera, Ball navigated life after two decades of marriage to Arnaz and adjusted to being the first woman to head a Hollywood studio.

Putting the focus on Ball and Vance would make space for a truer, and more complicated look at Lucy to surface. It also would offer a reminder that I Love Lucy was not just about the love story between Ricky and Lucy.

After all, while it is Arnaz’s Ricky who famously sings “I love Lucy,” the line could have easily been said by Vance’s Ethel. Their friendship served as its own emotional heart of the show. Because, as Feldman, the political scientist, pointed out during our conversation, “Ethel loved Lucy, too.”

The post Will the Real Lucille Ball Please Stand Up? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Warshow’s core insight: the Western hero was not a solitary yet indomitable figure but rather a tainted and failed one. “The pictures… end with his death or with his departure for some more remote frontier,” wrote Warshow. “What we finally respond to is not his victory but his defeat.”

Warshow didn’t live to see The Searchers, director John Ford’s Western masterpiece, which was filmed the following year. And there’s no evidence that either Ford or his screenwriter, Frank Nugent, ever read the essay. But their protagonist, Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne at the height of his rough-and-ready powers, snugly fits Warshow’s description.

Which brings me, 66 years later, to The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s ultra-contemporary take on this classic American genre.

Now, I’m not arguing that British-born Benedict Cumberbatch is cut from the same rugged denim as Wayne (though he sure knows how to fake it).  Nor would I suggest that Campion, a high-octane, highly cerebral New Zealander, is anything like the dour, hard-drinking, Irish-American Ford. But what I am saying is that The Searchers and The Power of the Dog have a lot in common, boast some of the same striking visual and narrative elements—and center around two powerful but deeply troubled protagonists.

Together, these films make a strong case for why the Western remains one of our most compelling cinematic inventions.

On the surface, the stories seem very different. The Searchers, set in frontier Texas in 1868 (but filmed in picturesque Monument Valley, Ford’s favorite Western location), is about an uncle’s quest to rescue Debbie, his 9-year-old niece, who’s been kidnapped by Comanches in a raid in which most of her family members were slaughtered. Ethan Edwards is a Civil War veteran who has stayed away from the family ranch for three years in large part because he is secretly in love with his brother’s wife, and she with him. After both brother and wife are murdered, he sets out to wreak vengeance on the killers.

But as the years pass, he also resolves to kill his niece, because she has grown into a young woman and become a Comanche wife. It’s an honor killing: she’s had sex with Indians, willingly or not, and therefore she must die. He is accompanied on his five-year search by Martin Pawley, Debbie’s adopted brother, who respects Ethan’s superior knowledge and leadership but is determined to prevent his uncle from harming his beloved sister.

The Searchers is a morally complex film and remains a controversial one. Its Comanche warriors are depicted as killers and rapists, but as the story unfolds, we begin to see that they and their families have also been slaughtered and victimized during the brutal, 40 year war of civilizations between Texans and Comanches, the longest conflict on American soil. And we also begin to see that Ethan, our charismatic hero, is a deeply disturbed racist.

The Power of the Dog takes place on a prosperous Montana ranch nearly 60 years later. But violence and family are also central to the story. Phil Burbank (Cumberbatch) and his soft-spoken younger brother George are equal business partners, but Phil is the alpha male—he’s cunning, arrogant, and abrasive, calling his brother “Fatso,” and repeatedly deriding George’s quiet decency. Phil rides herd over cattle, horses, and ranch hands with a macho swagger that includes castrating a bull.

The incident that triggers the film’s plot isn’t an Indian raid but George’s decision to pursue and marry Rose, a struggling widow operating a small-town boarding house. Her arrival at the Burbank mansion along with Peter, her sensitive, artistically inclined teenaged son, enrages Phil, who smells out her painful fragility, bullies her, and drives her to drink, all the while hurling homophobic slurs at Peter and inciting his ranch hands to join in the collective mockery.

Campion and Cumberbatch slowly allow us to see that Phil’s hyper-masculinity is an elaborate disguise. It turns out that Phil graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, where he studied the classics (“so he swears at the cattle in Greek or Latin?” quips a distinguished dinner guest). He learned his Western lore from an older cowboy named Bronco Henry, whose grooming of Phil clearly went well beyond the handling of livestock. Although Henry has been dead for two decades, Phil still worships him. Phil also keeps a stash of male magazines in a trunk that Peter discovers.

Each movie slowly zeroes in on the changing relationship between the main character and his younger male companion. In The Searchers, Ethan starts out by deriding Martin’s naïveté and lack of frontier experience but comes to admire the younger man’s grit and refusal to quit the search, despite having a good job and impatient fiancée waiting for him at home. When the two men finally discover the Comanche village where Debbie is living, Ethan grudgingly accedes to Martin’s demand that he be given the chance to rescue her before the camp is attacked by cavalrymen and Texas Rangers. “It’s your funeral,” Ethan tells him.

(Left to right) Jeffrey Hunter as Martin and John Wayne as Ethan in The Searchers. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

In The Power of the Dog, Phil, too, begins to warm to Peter, partly because he knows that Rose hates this budding friendship and partly because he is seeking to groom Peter the way Bronco Henry once groomed him. But Peter has his own subtle agenda, one that he successfully conceals from Phil, and he rescues his mother from her tormentor, just as Martin Pawley saves his sister from Ethan.

Like their angry, damaged protagonists, the two directors, Ford and Campion, have much in common. Both are visual poets who move deftly between the obliterating grandeur of their remote outdoor settings and the intimate emotions and conflicts played out in the dark, claustrophobic confines of ranch houses.

Ford bookends his movie with two of the most memorable camera shots in film history—framing a character within a doorway that opens onto the stunning vistas beyond. Campion too offers glimpses of the untamed wilderness through the windows of the ranch house’s kitchen and barn. Neither director lets us forget that we are at the edge of civilization, a place of raw power, harsh beauty, and abiding mystery, and the testing ground where both Ethan and Phil, true Men of the West, were forged.

Each director prefers pictures over words. Ford famously cut large chunks of dialogue from the Searchers script, leaving viewers to determine for themselves the true nature of Ethan’s feelings for Martha and the reason why he spares Debbie’s life at the movie’s thrilling climax. Similarly, Campion allows the faces and physical movements of her characters to convey emotions they themselves can’t or won’t admit to. And in the case of Peter, she uses his careful stare and eerie stillness to conceal his lethal plan and purpose.

But the human centerpiece of each film remains its solitary and deeply disturbed protagonist.

Ethan, deranged by his hatred and grief, uses gun violence to resolve his inner conflicts. Yet he doesn’t kill his niece, who reminds him of her dead mother, the only woman he has ever loved, and the brilliance of Wayne’s performance lies in the way he conveys his internal struggle while never articulating it. Phil is compelled to hide his sexuality from the men he leads, and perhaps from himself as well, and Cumberbatch skillfully conveys Phil’s inner turmoil.

Each man will be defeated by his younger companion. And in both movies, love finally triumphs over hate. Ethan will survive—you can’t kill John Wayne, he’s too strong—but he is too violent to dwell in the civilized world, and he is doomed like the Comanche corpse whose eyes he shoots out early in the film. He will wander forever between the winds.

Phil is an even more tragic figure. Set adrift like a ship without an anchor once George weds Rose, he tries to find stability by nurturing Peter, who ultimately brings out his better nature. But it’s too late. Peter has already determined that to save his mother, Phil must die.

Warshow’s essay foretold both men’s fates: to die or depart for an even more remote corner of the vast but ever-shrinking frontier. As Martin Scorsese once noted, the Western ultimately is a ghost story, its tales set in a past that can be evoked but never retrieved.

Or as film historian Edward Buscombe, another wise student of American cinema, has observed, “One way or another, Westerns are always about death.”

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