For years and years Variety‘s Steven Gaydos was an HE friendo, but over the last two or three he’s become…well, a tad judgmental. Okay, more than a tad. Okay, he’s become a woke scold. Which goes hand in hand with being a politically adaptable fellow working for a woke trade, and knowing which way the winds are blowing and who’s buttering which side of his bread, etc.
All to say that Gaydos recently tweeted about “sharing notes” with “recent” viewers of The Power of the Dog, “most of them young,” and that these young ‘uns, like Gaydos, feel that Jane Campion‘s 1920s cattle-ranch saga is “an upper.”
Repeating: Some youngish weirdos are telling Gaydos that the most melancholy gay western of the 21st Century and easily the draggiest downer of the 2021 Best Picture race…they’re saying it put a smile on their faces and made them giggle and skip down the sidewalk like schoolkids….whee!
We all understand that Dog is brilliantly composed in its own deliberate, unhurried fashion, but that’s not what Gaydos is talking about. He’s saying that Campion’s screenplay, which is based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, made his little Millennial pallies feel good.
They were turned on, in other words, by the story of a pretty young gay guy named Peter Gordon (Kodi Smith McPhee) who gradually gets around to murdering Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), an ugly, stinky, foul-tempered closet case. Phil has made life miserable for Peter’s mom, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), an alcoholic who’s come into unfortunate contact with Phil due to having married his chubby, ginger-haired brother, George (Jesse Plemons). And so Peter does what he feels he needs to do, for his mom’s sake.
And so that’s the thing — good young gay guy (delicate, soft-spoken, makes tiny paper flowers) kills the bad older gay guy by poisoning him with anthrax. And Gaydos’ young chums are going “whoo-whoo!…Phil is fucking dead, all right! Hey, let’s get on Facebook or Twitter and tell that Variety guy how cool we think this is!!”
There’s no question that Phil Burbank is a mean, snarly asshole, and that his death is, at the end of the day, no great loss to the planet earth, but the world is full of miserable people in denial about something or other (including their sexuality), and it’s not as if Phil had murdered anyone or tortured a dog to death or molested a child. He’s just a cruel dickhead who’s making his brother’s new wife very unhappy and turning her into a drunkard. Does he deserve to die for this? Campion clearly thinks he does, and Gaydos’ young pally-wallies are overjoyed by his killing.
What movie-villain deaths turned you on the most?