For about an hour, the last episode of Mark Maron’s WTF podcast went completely smoothly. The guest of the episode, Sam Elliott, speaks kindly on all sorts of topics and seems to be building a real relationship with Maron. And then, almost as a last thought, Maron asks Elliott, “Have you seen the Power of the Dog?”
And then it all went to hell.
“Yes, do you want to talk about this shit?” Elliott growled. Maron laughs with a stunned “Oh, no,” and then Elliott continues to give the strangest look at a film that may have ever been uttered aloud.
“There was a fucking full-page ad in the LA Times and there was a video that talked about gutting the American myth. And I thought, “What the hell? What the hell? … What are all these dancers, those guys in New York who wear bow ties and nothing? This is what all those fucking cowboys in this movie looked like, running around with boys and no shirts. There were all these allusions to homosexuality in the whole fucking movie. “
At that moment, Maron intervened. “I think that’s what the movie is about,” he suggests, not wrong.
“Well, what the hell does this woman from there – she’s a brilliant director – know about the American West, and why the hell did she make this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana?” That, damn it, rubbed me in the wrong way. “
Honestly, where do I start? The main conclusion, which is already reflected in several thousand titles elsewhere, is that Elliott does not seem to be very interested in gays. Towards the end of the WTF episode, he justified his bizarre statement by pointing out that he had just spent time in the American West, surrounded by families – “Not men, not men, families“- which suggests that this is the true image of the cowboys he would like to see on screen.
But it really sounds like Elliott just didn’t do his research. The Power of the Dog is an extremely strange film. It is based on a book written by a gay man about his experiences in the West, and almost every review written about the film mentions the closed longing in the heart of the film in the first few sentences. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Benedict Cumberbatch had to defend herself against allegations of embezzlement. But maybe Elliott hasn’t read this issue of Vanity Fair. Maybe he was repelled by all the swans on the cover.
His assumption that the film is not a true reflection of the West must also be dismissed. First, it’s a bit ridiculous to assume that there’s a force field across the American West that sucks gayness out of anyone who crosses it. But mainly – even due to some statistical impossibility – he is right, then what is the point of saying that all films should be a true depiction of real life? Elliott has amassed more than 100 acting credits in his 55-year career, and it’s no exaggeration to say that some of them were full-fledged cobblers.
Take the 1972 film Frogs, which culminates in a scene in which hundreds of frogs stare at a man while he has a heart attack. Or “The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Big Foot” in 2018, where he plays a man who must stop a deadly global virus by literally killing Sasquatch. Or the animated film Rock Dog, where he plays a wise old yak named Fleetwood Yak.
However, my favorite of Elliott’s complaints is that Jane Champion had the audacity to shoot a western in New Zealand. Imagine how furious he will be when he hears about Sergio Leone or one of the other western spaghetti directors. Imagine how angry he will be when he finds out that they have made the latest Batman movie in Scotland. Imagine the fury when he realizes that Robert Downey Jr. didn’t actually go into space in those Avengers movies. Indeed, all this recent WTF incident shows that we need to feel bad about Elliott. He is the only living movie star who doesn’t seem to know how movies work.