When it comes to the 2022 Oscar season, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is a widely-assumed frontrunner—but it’s certainly not everyone’s favorite. Specifically, don’t expect 1883 star and American western mainstay Sam Elliott to be casting his vote in the film’s direction. In a recent episode of the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, the actor got candid about the Campion flick, going so far as to call it a “piece of shit.”
“There was a fucking full-page ad out in the LA Times and there was a review, not a review, but a clip, and it talked about the ‘evisceration of the American myth.’ And I thought, ‘What the fuck? What the fuck?’” Elliott says. Speaking about himself and his on incredulity, he adds, “This is the guy that’s done westerns forever. The evisceration of the American West?”
The film starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, and Jesse Plemons follows a cowboy (Cumberbatch) who bristles at his brother’s new fiancée and her somewhat androgynous son. At points, the movie suggests that Cumberbatch’s character has repressed homosexual feelings for a mentor he had years before.
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At first, it seems like Elliott is taking umbrage with the idea that a critic said that the film dismantled the ideal of the American West, but that subtext of the plot also doesn’t sit right with him it would seem, as Elliott added this: “They made it look like—what are all those dancers that those guys in New York who wear bowties and not much else. Remember them from back in the day?” (The Chippendales.)
He continues on, saying, “That’s what all these fucking cowboys in that movie look like. They’re all running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the fucking movie.” Elliott also calls out director Jane Campion, asking what she knows about the American West and why she would film it in New Zealand and call it Montana, adding, “That fucking rubbed me the wrong way, pal.” He does go on to say that he’s a fan of her previous work.
Maron does confirm for Elliot that he thinks the movie is about Cumberbatch’s character’s homosexual feelings and pushes his guest a bit to try and pinpoint exactly Elliot’s core issue with the work is, Elliott falls back, reorienting his talk on his experience in Texas filming 1883, noting that he’s spent a good amount of time with families who settled in Texas—”big, long, extended, multiple generation families that made their living and their lives were all about being cowboys.”
So what is his beef? The phrasing of the review, maybe. Those damn gay cowboys. That Cumberbatch would ever wear his chaps in bed. (“Cumberbatch never got out of his fucking chaps… he’d walk into the fucking house, storm up the fucking stairs, go lay on his bed in his chaps, and play his banjo.”) I don’t know.
I do know Sam is right that there were definitely families that traveled together and settled in the American West. I also know that gay people have been around since forever. So it’s difficult to imagine that the West was only inhabited by straight, family-focused ranchers. The chaps situation, I can’t address. That’s just poor hygiene.
Also—and can’t believe we have to flag this to an actor but—this is movie. Sometimes they take creative license, kind of like how in the Sam Elliott movie Quigley Down Under, Elliott’s character refers to his Sharps Rifle as a lever action, when in fact, it’s a falling block action. These things do happen. Either way, Sam Elliott did not like The Power of the Dog, and it seems that given the opportunity, he would have had more horses in it.
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