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

There Will Be Blood

Daniel Day-Lewis in "Dorf: The Movie"

Grade: A –
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, and Ciarán Hinds
Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hour, 38 minutes

The itch to remonstrate any Paul Thomas Anderson film as pretentious is not without justification. Remember the frog-shower in Magnolia? Yep, that was him. But, from Hard Eight to Boogie Nights to Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson’s filmography has always been stamped with the brand “flawed masterpiece,” works that are simultaneously brilliant, indulgent, and infuriating.

These descriptors also apply to There Will Be Blood, and they are qualities that Anderson shares – perhaps not altogether coincidentally – with its larger-than-life protagonist, Daniel Plainview. At once both a riveting character study and a scorching metaphor, Anderson’s adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! is at least equally influenced by the cinema that comprised the syllabus for Anderson’s cinematic self-education – Giant, Citizen Kane, even the three-act narrative structure of Kubrick’s 2001 (headlined by a half-hour opening chapter sans dialogue that could well be called “The Dawn of Daniel”). It is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre had Bogie’s Fred Dobbs been the one to emerge from the hills with all the gold. No film over the past year has haunted me more departing the theater, and no film has grown in my esteem the longer I have pondered it.

Within Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswit’s epic stereogram is a Faustian fever dream that deconstructs both the Horatio Alger mythos and the American ethos. The story of Plainview – whom the luminous Daniel Day-Lewis instills with an almost reptilian gait and a melodious baritone mimicking John Huston – reflects much that is admirable and reproving in the American experience. A turn-of-the-century Texas prospector who crawls miles of rugged terrain after shattering his leg just to stake claim to a silver mine, Plainview embodies the hardscrabble spirit that legend tells us built this country. His later trek to California in search of an oil-rich expanse and financial glory mirrors our nation’s western expansion.

Once there, Plainview preys on the want of cash-strapped homesteaders to acquire great swaths of land on which to build his derricks and fiscal empire. Yet, even as his coffers overflow, Plainview’s descent into personal decay is precipitous. The more economic success he attains, the more he cordons himself from those around him, even his deaf adopted son H.W. (Dillon Freasier, then Russell Harvard as an adult). Accompanied by Jonny Greenwood’s ethereal score, Plainview develops into a fistula protruding from capitalism’s seamy underbelly: shrewd, diabolical, and cunning…everything we continue to admire and even demand from our corporate and political leaders. Anderson’s most devious trick is triggering the faint notion that even after all Plainview’s foibles and personal tragedies are laid bare, many of us would still trade places with him if his mansion and money came with the deal.

Deciphering motives behind Plainview’s madness is a thorny matter, and it is one There Will Be Blood’s starkest shortcomings. Beyond the general dislike for his fellow man Plainview confesses (to a man he later murders), his psychosis seems driven primarily by a running to-and-fro with local preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). Originally uneasy business partners, their relationship devolves into a series of indignities and reprisals, notably duel violent baptisms each inflicts upon the other, one by oil and the other by water.

Together, Eli and Plainview represent a microcosm of the often unholy marriage between capitalism and religion. Capitalism remains one of the only systems that embraces freedom of religion, including freedom from it. Yet, even today Pope Benedict XVI’s writings and speeches regularly condemn capitalism for its “degradation of personal dignity” and for widening the gulf between rich and poor. Andrew Bernstein, author of The Capitalist Manifesto, writes that religion is inherently incompatible with capitalism not just for its abhorrence of profit motives, but “[religion] demands the subordination of the individual's mind and the individual's interests to the dictates of some higher authority. Under capitalism, by contrast, the individual is supreme.”

Plainview’s inability to submit to any authority beyond his self-interest, much less one that requires him to confess and confront his wickedness, illuminates There Will Be Blood’s driving conflict and clarifies its cataclysmic (and undoubtedly divisive) climax. Charles Foster Kane dies pining for his Rosebud; Daniel Plainview’s perverse redemption flows from obliterating his own.

Neil Morris