The Master

I'm Still Here...

Grade: B

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern, Ambyr Childers and Jesse Plemons

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 17 min.

Of all the influences on Paul Thomas Anderson’s post-World War II American saga The Master, the life and times of L. Ron Hubbard ranks no higher than Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and tycoon Edward L. Doheny did on There Will Be Blood. While Anderson acknowledges using Hubbard as an inspiration for Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a shaman-cum-charlatan heading an Eisenhower-era spiritual movement called “The Cause,” don’t expect a roman à clef chronicling the birth and belief system of Scientology.

The Master’s central focus isn’t even the nature of personality cults, as in Martha Marcy May Marlene, though that’s certainly one of many undercurrents to this enigmatic epic. Instead, Anderson returns to familiar themes found throughout his short but resplendent filmography: the search for a father figure or lost son; dysfunctional family relationships; and flawed men fated to self-destruction.

The biggest surprise, however, is that The Master isn’t really Dodd’s story—indeed, the film’s title is a misnomer, referring not simply to Dodd but rather those things in everyone’s lives that preoccupy or even control them. Rather, the real protagonist is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a sailor stationed in the Pacific Theater who spends his R-and-R humping anatomical sand castles and masturbating in the surf. Returning stateside and suffering from some unspecified emotional disorder, the dissipated Freddie’s only real passion is mixing bootleg liquor using darkroom chemicals, paint thinner, cleaning supplies and anything else at his disposal. When he loses a job as a department store portrait photographer fighting one of his many coifed, well-heeled subjects, he lashes out at an ideal he knows he’ll never appreciate or attain. After he’s chased away from work as a Steinbeck-ian cabbage picker, Freddie winds up a stowaway aboard a yacht being chartered by Dodd and a handful of his followers.

Dodd takes in the brutish Freddie, whom he likens to a fearful animal that eats its own excrement. However, it’s never clear whether the Master’s motives are altruistic, opportunistic or even sexual. Through a system of “processing”—undoubtedly modeled after Scientology’s “auditing”—Dodd seeks to exorcise Freddie’s demons and assimilate him into the fold.

Encased in atmospheric amber, The Master emulates the pace and palette of There Will Be Blood—if you splice Jonny Greenwood’s score for both, you couldn’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Although Blood is 20 minutes longer, theater viewers may exit The Master believing the opposite to be true. However, while Anderson’s oil epic was a character-driven allegory about Americanism and religion, the writer-director came to his newest project full of big ideas but became both enamored and distracted by his formidable actors along way.

Phoenix, appearing in his first film since the underappreciated I’m Still Here, gives an engrossing, awards-worthy performance. He compresses Freddie’s morass of rage, insecurity and anti-social behavior behind an inarticulate mumble, frozen sneer and graceless gait, a vessel that sometimes appears only vaguely human. Dodd—who describes himself as “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher”—leans on charm and polish to peddle his mix of mysticism, science fiction and dime store psychology. But, he’s most revealing when Hoffman flashes an anxiety and anger simmering just below his well-scrubbed facade, such as when a naysayer challenges his dogma at a dinner party or a benefactor (Laura Dern) frets over a word change to a processing question made in Dodd’s second tome—through Hoffman, Dodd responds to this incident with irritation tinged with a vague surprise that anyone would notice, much less brood over such vagaries.

Together, Dodd and Freddie are two sides of the same animalistic coin—a scene in which they meet, physically and emotionally, in the middle of conjoining jail cells is unforgettable. Still, there’s only so many ways to (re)make this point. Anderson doesn’t pivot away from his two leads long enough to fully develop the many underwritten supporting characters, including Dodd’s biological son (Jesse Plemons) and daughter (Ambyr Childers), and his son-in-law (Rami Malek). Amy Adams is terrific as Peggy, Dodd’s wife, the power behind the throne who is part feminine ideal, part Lady Macbeth, but her performance becomes frustratingly one-note the more it plays second fiddle to Hoffman and Phoenix.

As a result, narrative opportunities are squandered. When the police show up to arrest Dodd, Anderson not only leaves viewers to assume Dodd is guilty of an unexplained financial grievance, he also wastes screen time show Freddie yet again fight someone (this time cops) that could have been used to elaborate on big ideas like a historical intolerance, sometimes hostility, by the government towards nontraditional faiths in a country that promises freedom of religion.

The one question The Master does lucidly pose is whether reforming the personality of a lout like Freddie is possible or even prudent. In so doing, Anderson—an avowed Stanley Kubrick devotee who reportedly filmed portions of The Master using the actual 65mm camera used to shoot 2001—has made his version of A Clockwork Orange. It’s a comparison underscored by such scenes as a dinner party in which Freddie visualizes all the ladies in attendance naked, and a final shot that I half expected to be accompanied by a voice over proclaiming, “I was cured all right.”

In one of the film’s more tedious montages, Dodd assigns Freddie an “application” that involves walking back and forth across a well-furnished room and finding different ways each time to describe the wood wall and windowpane he touches on either side. It’s an exercise not unlike watching The Master, a handsome canvas that’s open to interpretation, not explication.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

I'm Still Here

Joaquin Phoenix stars in "The Brad Pitt Story"

Grade: B +

Director: Casey Affleck

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

The question of whether the meltdown of Joaquin Phoenix, recounted in the film I’m Not Here, is real or an elaborate hoax is at once both inconsequential and crucial to accurately assessing the picture’s merits.

For the record, I have disbelieved Phoenix’s announced withdrawal from acting and decision to launch a career as a hip-hop artist ever since his incoherent, disheveled appearance on Late Night with David Letterman back in February of 2009 to promote the film Two Lovers. While the actor’s tells from that interview are too numerous and nuanced to elucidate here, my skepticism was only heightened after viewing I’m Not Here.

Maybe the tipping point was the scene when Phoenix is offered a supporting role in the movie Greenberg during a visit to his home by funnyman Ben Stiller, the film’s star, and not Noah Baumbach, its writer-director. Or, maybe it’s the fact that the production company formed by Phoenix and Casey Affleck – Phoenix’s brother-in-law and the film’s credited director and, ahem, co-writer – is named They Are Going to Kill Us Productions. And, anyone still uncertain should stick around for the closing credits, during which they will discover that Phoenix’s father during a climactic visit to Panama is played by Tim Affleck, Ben and Casey’s dad.

Critics are divided on both Phoenix and the film’s authenticity. Roger Ebert, for one, trumpets its veracity and, after hedging his review by writing, “(i)f this film turns out to still be part of an elaborate hoax, I’m going to be seriously pissed,” goes on to lecture Phoenix about his bad behavior (“a waste of the gift of life”). Detractors declare that if this chronicle of Phoenix’s mental breakdown is real, then the film is sad and exploitative; if it is “fake,” then the entire project is just irrelevant and narcissistic.

In reality, this debate over I’m Still Here’s truthiness is both a red herring and part of the film’s reason for being. Phoenix has always had a complicated relationship with the vocation of acting, dating back to his days as a child actor. Indeed, the fact that it is likely an Andy Kaufman-esque riff on Hollywood and the trappings of celebrity actually makes certain elements of this meta-documentary more praiseworthy. For one, it transforms Phoenix’s act from pitiable to an award-worthy performance – performance art, even – ranking among the best roles of his career. The same could be said for Sean “Diddy” Combs, whom Phoenix pursues with Ahab-like zeal in an effort to convince the hip-hop mogul to produce his debut rap album. Combs lampoons his aloof public persona while also engendering an appreciation for his artistic and business acumen.

The point of I’m Still Here is not whether Joaquin Phoenix is still all there. Instead, the salient issue is the very real public reaction to his purported collapse. The film opens with a montage of accolades Phoenix received in the wake of his Oscar-nominated performance in Walk The Line: one talk show and awards gala appearance after another, answering the same vapid questions in interview after interview. Only in Hollywood can a hug and kiss be the most insincere form of personal expression.

Soon thereafter, Phoenix publically declares his intent to quit acting during an October 2008 appearance at a benefit play for Paul Newman’s Association of Hole in the Wall Camps. It is amusing to note that even as Phoenix is in the midst of ostensibly bowing out of the film industry, he complains that Affleck gets to perform with Tom Hanks and Jack Nicholson while Phoenix gets stuck reading alongside Danny DeVito.

Over the ensuing months, Affleck’s roving handheld camera – which, curiously, manages to shoot many supposedly verite conversations from multiple POVs – captures the actor’s delusionary descent. In between his pursuant of Diddy and efforts to book rap performances at clubs from Miami to Vegas, Phoenix rants like a lunatic, snorts cocaine, cavorts with call girls, and generally abuses his two man-servants/hangers-on (at least when they aren’t clipping his back hair). Principal among them is Antony “Anton” Langdon, former guitarist of the British rock band Spacehog, who spends most of the film alternately prancing around naked, allegedly selling Phoenix’s secrets to the press, and, most infamously, appearing to defecate on a sleeping Phoenix after an especially vicious argument.

While particularly repulsive, that latter scene is, strangely, the film’s most symbolic moment. I’m Still Here represents Phoenix and Affleck – both younger siblings of brothers devoured by the tabloid press – taking a giant dump on the entertainment industry. In fact, the conspicuous lack of any of mention of River Phoenix is the film’s glaring element of restraint and the most telling sign that I’m Still Here is a put-on. Any true examination of Joaquin’s scarred psyche would unavoidably require mentioning the night in 1993 when River died from a drug overdose on a Hollywood sidewalk as a 19-year-old Joaquin – who then known as Leaf – screamed for help to a 911 dispatcher.

Instead, we get Phoenix diving offstage to attack a heckler at a Miami nightclub after a particular woeful rap set, all while other patrons wear mock beards patterned after Phoenix’s comical guest spot on Letterman. Even if Phoenix’s public antics were faked, what’s undeniably “true” is the media fervor that surrounded Phoenix’s bizarre behavior, how he was pilloried for essentially daring to step outside a circumscribed box. Odd or not, all Phoenix really did publically was grow a beard and declare his desire to quit acting and take up music instead. For that, he was ridiculed mercilessly. Because it is a hoax, I’m Still Here isn’t a window into Joaquin Phoenix’s consciousness. Rather, it’s a mirror reflecting our own.

Neil Morris

*Orginally published at http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-curious-case-of-joaquin-phoenix-in-im-still-here/Content?oid=1665630