Every festival season has its standout star — the person who shows up in two or three or four movies in quick programming succession, suddenly seems ubiquitous on all those red carpets, becomes the unofficial face of the awards-circuit gauntlet. There are already a few solid candidates for this year’s festival. There’s Oscar Isaac, who hit Venice with the HBO miniseries redo of Scenes From a Marriage, Dune, and The Card Counter,Paul Schrader’s latest character study of existentially brooding, solitary men. (Find someone to love you the way Schrader loves Pickpocket.) Or maybe it’s Isaac’s Marriage co-star Jessica Chastain, who helped send Twitter into a tizzy when the duo conducted pre-screening electricity on the Lido, and whose televangelist biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye is giving the actor her moment in the prosthetics-and-crying-jags-performance spotlight. Some might even make a case for Tim Roth, courtesy of an art-house double shot that lets him go from shades of gray (Bergman Island) to you-want-it-darker (Sundown).
For our money, however, there’s really only one possible lead contender: Benedict Cumberbatch. Starting with The Power of the Dog, his quadruple-threat entry (it made the lineups for Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York) and the much-needed return to the big screen for Jane Campion, and followed quickly by the Telluride-to-TIFF dramedy The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, the British star/all-around internet thirst-trap gave festival audiences interesting samples of his range. You can see hints of the go-to moves and tics that the 45-year-old star usually employs (every actor has them, some more than others) in his portrayals of the complicated, confused, cut-off-from-social-norms men in both of these movies. The two films together suggest that he may be shifting gears. While the difficulty of each project is more difficult than the others, each turn leads him to interesting and challenging territory. Cumberbatch is currently in its fall and rise season.
First, the superior of twins. An adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, The Power of the Dog is a Western that falls somewhere between revisionist and ragingly Freudian — a frontier tale of brothers not characterized by anything resembling brotherly love. We’re in Montana, still barely tamed even though the year is 1925. Cumberbatch’s character is a born-and-bred cowboy, albeit one cursed with the very non-cowboyish name of Phil Burbank. He went away to an Eastern college once upon a time, then came back to run the family’s cattle ranch. George Plemons (his sibling) is his partner in the venture. George is as calm and meticulous as Phil. He is only one polkadotted bow tie away of being a true gentleman. Phil calls him “Fatso,” even though George isn’t particularly fat. It gives Phil the psychological edge over the beta-related blood male.
Rose Dunst (a widow) enters the picture. Her talents and silent-movie star eyes are very much put to good use. She runs a restaurant attached to a bar a few towns over, where the rowdy cowhands like to drink after they’ve herded the steers along. Rose and George take a shine to each other; soon, they’re married, which means she’s moving into the Burbank ranch. Phil is not happy about this. It also means that Phil’s son Peter (Kodi McPhee), a gangly, awkward teenager who loves science and making paper flowers will be more around. Phil is not a fan of Peter. The feelings are mutual. The cowboy’s constant humiliation of the female boy, as well as his prairie-dusted bullies in general, seems outrageously cruel. But, like most things that involve Phil the cruelty is the main point.
There’s a reason Cumberbatch’s man of the west particularly doesn’t care for the lad, one that’s so obvious you can barely call it a secret. Let’s just say there’s plentiful talk about “Bronco Henry,” Phil’s mentor in all things horse-related, and the impact he left on this tortured cowboy. (Lotta fetishistic saddle-polishing happening during Phil’s downtime.) This is what the actor must play with. He’s a John Wayne type, overcompensating for his many insecurities and constantly balling his calloused fingers into defensive fists. He’s also got to compete with the background, given that Campion has made a proper, old-school Western, which fills every inch of the frame with majestic landscapes and a meticulously recreated, hardscrabble way of life.
Cumberbatch’s notes resonate in a surprising way. There’s a concrete sense that you’re watching him playing the somebody this character thinks he should be, a sort of dual act of commitment to a persona. And when he occasionally drops the mask — when he momentarily lets you into Phil’s well-guarded mindset — there’s an even greater sense that you’re watching an actor feel his way through a moment. There have been few close-ups this year that have felt so exhilarating as the one featuring Cumberbatch’s reaction to hearing that his brother, with whom he desperately wants an unearned comradeship, has gotten hitched on the sly. It’s the look of someone taking in information, trying to hide a seismic reaction, partially failing to conceal said reaction, and then attempting to shut the emotional door as quickly as possible. It’s subtle, little more than 30 seconds of screen time, and it’s unforgettably devastating.
This movie is a great example of toxic frontier masculinity. It’s able to make up for the weaknesses of the film, such as the unbalanced dynamic between the brothers, the over-reliance on the outdated concept of manly code-switching and some melodramatic sequences which feel like they could easily turn into Cliffs Notes on Camp. There’s a fearlessness in his labor here as well that you can tell Campion, as always a great director of actors, loves too — it’s a very game-recognizes-game type of project. By the time you find out what the film’s title means (it comes from a biblical verse), Cumberbatch has given this morally dubious figure an arc that lends pathos to the tragedy. It’s some of the best work he’s ever done that didn’t involve deductive sleuthing.
Cumberbatch in ‘The Electrical Life of Louis Wain.’
If Dog gave us a tamped-down, closed-off Benedict, someone white-knuckling it to keep the lid on things, his next festival film offered up a friskier, no-filter version of a feline-obsessed misfit. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain — even the title screams “for you utmost consideration” — is co-writer/director Will Sharpe’s attempt to bring the 19th century artist back into the public consciousness, and give the man credited with popularizing the notion of cats as pet-friendly creatures his 15 minutes of prestige-project fame. It’s an extremely potent mix of historical pomposity and irreverent, pin-pricking Brit whimsy, ambitiously aiming for the Venn diagram middle between Masterpiece Theater and Monty Python.
Cumberbatch is Wain, an ambidextrous sketch savant who’s socially maladjusted to a fault. Wain accepts a job drawing caricatures for a newspaper, despite the fact that he must support his sisters and mother, a boho Victorian woman. He falls for Emily (Claire Foy), a neurotic, nonconformist who is the governess responsible for his youngest children. Louis and Emily marry after they adopt a stray cat. He then focuses on drawing many of their furry friends. They are a great PR boost for animals that were once exotic, mysterious, or not domesticated.
The beginning of the film is a wild romp that quickly turns into a madcap tearjerker and then a traditional portrait of an eccentric. Finally, it becomes a calculated crowd-pleaser that fills fall programs year in and out. (Put it to you this way: It’s a film that has exactly zero problem subtitling the meows of cats, complete with purposefully bad syntax and cute misspellings.) Cumberbatch, however, is the glue that keeps things together, and it’s evident that he’s both adding nuances and amping up the broader strokes when necessary, especially in the movie’s strong first half. A huge emotional breakdown is shown simply through Wain’s inability to properly light a match, a small gesture the actor somehow gives the right amount of weight. He plays well with others here, from Foy to Andrea Riseborough’s shrieking uptight sister and Toby Jones’ stiff-upper-lipped editor. He exceeds his expectations, making things unpredictable, even when the movie follows the obvious path.
And along with that darker-natured Cumberbatch film making the rounds, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain also proves that, right now, you can throw just about anything at the actor and he’ll make it feel compelling — even a rote role. If Cumberbatch isn’t in his autumn years, he has certainly made this year’s autumn his.