Paul Thomas Anderson (2012)
There are brilliant things in The Master but the film often seems pointless too. The brilliance makes the pointlessness intriguing. Paul Thomas Anderson is an uncompromising writer and director. He’s determined to take as long as he wants to tell a story that evidently fascinates him. He shows no signs of worry that audiences might get bored or not feel the same way. The Master, set in 1950, tells the story of a maladjusted World War II veteran called Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and his experiences in and around a spiritual-philosophical movement known as ‘The Cause’ – in particular, Freddie’s relationship with the movement’s charismatic leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The tenets of The Cause are familiar from Scientology and Dodd is widely assumed to be based on L Ron Hubbard but the real life sources of the story are obviously less important to Anderson than dramatising the dynamics of a movement of this kind and the force of personality at the head of such a movement. (I’m sure Anderson would have been more than capable of inventing a completely fictitious cosmogony for The Cause.) Whether or not The Cause is merely a convenient pseudonym for Scientology, however, most people who go to see The Master are likely to find Lancaster Dodd’s philosophy ludicrous. The contrast between Philip Seymour Hoffman’s insistently calm conviction in his delivery of Dodd’s pronouncements and the nonsense that these pronouncements contain is impressive; but what Dodd has to say is so unconvincing that it’s hardly seductive. The audience can observe how Dodd’s charisma works on adherents to The Cause and admire Hoffman’s charisma as an actor. We don’t feel Dodd working on us, however. This sense of detachment means that the challenge for the audience isn’t any kind of intellectual or emotional one. It’s merely a challenge of sitting through the movie.
The Master bears substantial similarities to There Will Be Blood (according to Wikipedia, Anderson ‘used early drafts’ of the screenplay for the latter when he was writing The Master). Both centre on the relationship between two men, one of whom leads (or comes to lead) a dubious spiritual organisation. One of the remarkable features of There Will Be Blood is that Daniel Day-Lewis’s Plainview becomes unarguably more insane in the course of the picture but that this isn’t achieved by obvious changes in his behaviour or appearance. In The Master, Joaquin Phoenix’s odd, hunched gait gets more pronounced and his face more raddled yet the same thing happens: there isn’t a particular moment where you notice that he’s different from before. And in both films the story that Anderson is telling becomes more abstract. You end up mainly aware of, as well as admiring, the acting of the leading man – with the difference that in The Master there are two leading men. (This isn’t to disparage Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood: he simply doesn’t have anything like as much screen time as Day-Lewis, or Phoenix and Hoffman.) The relationship between Dodd and Freddie in The Master is fascinating to observe – it focuses increasingly on the question of who needs who more – but the context is so particular that the story doesn’t have any real resonance. There is, however, one great sequence. Freddie and Dodd are being held in neighbouring prison cells. The contrast between Hoffman’s stillness and Phoenix’s violent physical activity is truly breathtaking but you want to laugh when Dodd then assures Freddie that ‘Your fear of capture and imprisonment is an implant from millions of years ago’. Taking this opportunity to reiterate one of the tenets of The Cause’s creed seems sure to agitate Freddie even more. So it does but then Dodd joins in too. As they go at each other hammer and tongs, you briefly believe in another piece of The Cause’s dogma: that the men’s ‘animal’ existence is something distinct from who they really are.
Anderson doesn’t explain in detail how Freddie, once he’s returned home in 1945, gets to be a store portait photographer or how, once that career has ended after he assaults a customer, he comes to find work on a cabbage farm. After Freddie’s left the farm, he sees the lights of a yacht moored in the water alongside which he’s walking at evening. (This is Lancaster Dodd’s yacht and Freddie, who’s drunk, makes his way on board.) This sequence delivers a very strong sense not only of the lack of direction of Freddie’s life but also of bafflement as to how his life reached this point. Later on, though, Anderson seems to be using lack of explanation as a pretext for not working out a more believable way of moving the story forward, once Freddie has left The Cause. This is particularly true of the phone call Freddie takes from Dodd as he sits in an otherwise empty cinema (presumably this is a dream) and how he manages to find Dodd in England.
When Freddie gets into fights (as he often does), Joaquin Phoenix’s body is extraordinarily contorted. He becomes a remarkable image of someone who’s psychologically screwed up. Phoenix develops the hollowed-out look of someone whose mental illness makes them look physically odd even though you can’t quite put your finger on what it is that’s odd. While his scenes with Hoffman are at the heart of The Master, I thought one of Phoenix’s finest moments was in a scene with the mother of Freddie’s ex-girlfriend Doris. He visits the family home to be told that Doris is now married with kids and living in Alabama. The mother (Lena Endre) stands in the doorway, talking affably but nervously with Freddie. The conversation is going nowhere and she says, ‘It was nice seeing you’. He immediately comes back with ‘Oh, I’m going, am I?’ so she asks if he wants to come in. He refuses the invitation equally instantly and goes. Joaquin Phoenix brilliantly distils in this short scene the character of a man to whom you’re bound to say the wrong thing and whose aggressive indecision makes him intimidating. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s mastery of Lancaster Dodd’s deep reserves of cant is no surprise. His transitions between orotund complacency and fulminating anger have tremendous impact. By the time Dodd and Freddie are reunited in England, the two actors’ faces have taken such a hold – Anderson frequently shoots them in close-up – that they’ve become the primary focus of The Master in more ways than one. Dodd sitting in his London office and singing to Freddie ‘(I’d Like To Get You On A) Slow Boat to China’, it’s perhaps the climax of The Master. Although it might seem to confirm that Dodd has homosexual feelings for Freddie, this serenade is outstanding because Hoffman’s speak-singing is a high point of his virtuosity, not because the moment is any kind of summary of the relationship between the two men.
The Master is imaginatively cast. Anderson uses Amy Adams’ pretty affability to strongly subversive effect. Her performance as Dodd’s wife is one of her best yet. Here too the imperceptible but total shifts of mood – from sunniness to deadly emotionlessness and back – are beautifully achieved. Laura Dern has a good role as the Philadelphia hostess who makes the mistake of paying too careful attention to Dodd’s sayings: she’s on the receiving end of one of his most explosive outbursts when she queries why his latest book invites readers to ‘try to imagine’ rather than ‘try to recall’ their past lives. Anderson’s dialogue is exceptionally good throughout and he creates some fine images, notably the sand woman constructed by Freddie’s fellow marines on the beach at the start of the movie. The sexually overcharged Freddie simulates copulation with the woman. In the final shot, he’s sleeping quietly beside her. Anderson uses Jonny Greenwood’s music very persistently, and the persistence conveys effectively the subject of obsession which is central to The Master. What makes this film as absorbing as it’s exasperating is that Anderson’s obsessive approach registers more convincingly than the story that he’s chosen to tell.
17 November 2012
