In 1925 Montana, wealthy rancher Jesse Plemons marries widowed Kirsten Dunst and assumes responsibility for seeing to the education her her son, Kodi Smit-McPhee. The youngster wants to be a surgeon, but his swishy manner draws the rancor of everyone. This includes, at first, Plemons' brother and partner, the unwashed, contemptuous Benedict Cumberbatch. He has been tormenting Miss Dunst from the get-go. Suddenly he changes in his attitude for the adolescent.
At a store after the movie, a clerk noticed my ticket and asked my opinion of the movie. "It's a study in varieties of self-contempt," I said, "With a Patricia Highsmith sociopath thrown into the mix." The writer-director, Jane Campion, has long focused on studies of people who don't fit into the muscular, masculine world that is mythic to Australia. Here she has focused on a similar society in the closing days of the Old West, and produced a similar work from Thomas Savage's novel.
The dictates of society are relentless. The performances are sterling. The camera work by Ari Wegner is gorgeous. Ms Campion doesn't just lay the homoerotic symbolism with a trowel; she backs the cement mixer up and upends it over everything. And in the end, I wished that I had never heard of any of them, so annoying -- at best -- did I find them. There's not one admirable individual to be found, and I deeply regret having spent more than two hours with the bunch of them. Perhaps this was a story that needed to be told, but it was not one I needed to have told to me.
At a store after the movie, a clerk noticed my ticket and asked my opinion of the movie. "It's a study in varieties of self-contempt," I said, "With a Patricia Highsmith sociopath thrown into the mix." The writer-director, Jane Campion, has long focused on studies of people who don't fit into the muscular, masculine world that is mythic to Australia. Here she has focused on a similar society in the closing days of the Old West, and produced a similar work from Thomas Savage's novel.
The dictates of society are relentless. The performances are sterling. The camera work by Ari Wegner is gorgeous. Ms Campion doesn't just lay the homoerotic symbolism with a trowel; she backs the cement mixer up and upends it over everything. And in the end, I wished that I had never heard of any of them, so annoying -- at best -- did I find them. There's not one admirable individual to be found, and I deeply regret having spent more than two hours with the bunch of them. Perhaps this was a story that needed to be told, but it was not one I needed to have told to me.