While 1883 actor Sam Elliot had some choice words for director Jane Campion’s Oscar hopeful The Power of the Dog, the screen veteran’s comments couldn’t have been further off the mark for various reasons. While actors and directors have always commented on each other’s work, in recent years, the online news cycle has resulted in this tendency causing their publicists no end of grief. For example, Brian Cox’s comments on Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow were widely misinterpreted and led to many commentators castigating the actor for things he never said.
On the other hand, the rise of podcasts has also made long-form, informal interviews more common. This has resulted in many industry professionals having more rope to proverbially damage themselves with, whether it is actor Julia Fox going viral on TikTok for her inventive pronunciation of Uncut Gems or 1883 star Sam Elliot making the news for his vitriolic tirade about The Power of the Dog. However, the latter is significantly more misinformed and harmful than the clip from Josh Safdie’s erstwhile muse.
In a short clip that went viral (via WTF With Marc Maron), Elliot comfortably outdid Cox’s Pirates of the Caribbean comments as he slammed the broadly-acclaimed western for a string of reasons. Among these were the director’s nationality, the movie’s themes of homosexuality, its attempts to deconstruct the Western mythos, and its costuming. The thing is, Elliot is embarrassingly wrong on every front (save for The Power of the Dog’s choice to shoot in New Zealand rather than Montana, a fair criticism as it did rob the movie of some stunning vistas). Elliot implies that a director from New Zealand couldn’t understand the American West, ignoring the Italian icon Sergio Leone’s transformative influence on the genre. He claims the movie’s cowboys look like Chippendale dancers when the point of their clothing (particularly Phil’s) is that they are playing into an archetype and embodying a bygone era.
Calling Phil’s clothing inaccurate is akin to calling Leatherface’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre mask unhygienic, profoundly missing the message the costume is meant to send. Phil looks like a cosplaying cowboy for the same reason he doesn’t bathe, which is that, by 1925, the so-called Wild West was well on its way to an end and, as The Power of the Dog's costumer designer Kirsty Cameron alluded to in an interview (via Indiewire), Phil is deluded about this reality. He is a Yale graduate who never got over his first love and built his entire rough-hewn cowhand persona around that fact, something that is obvious even on first viewing.
Meanwhile, Elliot’s objections to “allusions to homosexuality” ignores several classics such as Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, which brought queerness into the Western genre well before Campion’s hit. Not only that, but it’s pretty rich for Elliot to call The Power of the Dog’s deconstruction of the Western mythos historically inaccurate when he’s currently starring in 1883, playing a heroic Pinkerton agent despite the real-life agency being infamous for strikebreaking, union-busting, and goon squad-assembling.
Elliot’s show genuinely does indulge in the un-ironic glamorization of “the American myth” that The Power of the Dog challenges, making the actor’s comments even harder to defend. Ironically, near the end of his rant, Elliot comes close to understanding the point of Campion’s movie. He claims that “the myth is that they were these macho men with the cattle,” apparently referring to the American myth that The Power of the Dog was praised for eviscerating. Elliot notes that this myth is inaccurate and that entire multi-generational families maintained ranches regardless of their gender. This is precisely why The Power of the Dog challenged and deconstructed this myth, something the actor fails to grasp in the interview.