With so much news recently, I needed a bit of an escape. I scanned a list of awards season contenders for new films to watch. I had never heard of Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” until Sam Elliott decided that it does not qualify as a cowboy movie. Elliott is one of those character actors who seem to have subsumed his core identity into the roles he has played in dozens of movies and television shows. It is cool to lust for Elliott — gruff, masculine, western, small-c conservative, with a mustache made for pornography — or, rather, for the type of masculinity he performs. Women and gay men and nonbinary people frequently remark on his appeal. While that appeal might have a daddy-issues vibe, it is also nostalgic for an old-school movie star masculinity that was problematic in its own time (the patriarchal colonialism!) and that has been now defanged in the #MeToo era. The anachronism of Elliott’s cowboy archetype makes him safe enough to lust after.
Elliott’s commentary and Campion’s movie reminded us that the West may be dead but the patriarchy has not disappeared. Elliott took issue with the film’s “allusions to homosexuality” and questioned Campion’s western bona fides. It has been more than a decade since “Brokeback Mountain” should have made his critique passé. But Elliott is riding the wave of a western resurgence. His current vehicle, “1883,” is a prequel to “Yellowstone,” one of the most popular shows in America. In it Elliott plays basically himself as the last real man. It’s a role he has played many times before. That’s why his snub of “The Power of the Dog” garnered attention.
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