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The Power of the Dog
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Veteran actor Sam Elliott has starred in his fair share of Westerns, but he’s not too impressed with The Power of the Dog, director Jane Campion‘s Oscar-nominated take on the genre. The 1883 star slammed the Netflix film during a February 28 appearance on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, calling it “a piece of shit.”
Elliott told Maron that he was offended by a film review describing The Power of the Dog an “evisceration of the American myth.”
“I thought, ‘What the fuck? What the fuck?’ This is the guy that’s done westerns forever,” he said, comparing The Power of the Dog‘s cowboys to Chippendales dancers “who wear bowties and not much else.”
Elliott continued: “[The cowboys in the film are] all running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the fucking movie.”
“I think that’s what the movie’s about,” Maron said of The Power of the Dog, which suggests that domineering rancher Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a closeted gay man.
Although Elliott noted that he “loves” Campion’s previous work, he questioned how equipped she was to tell this particular story as a native New Zealander.
“What the fuck does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American west?” he said. “And why in the fuck does she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, ‘This is the way it is.’ That fucking rubbed me the wrong way, pal.”
