THE MASTER

Stars: Joaquin Phoenix, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern, Ambyr Childers, Rami Malek, Jesse Piemons, Kevin J. Connor, Christopher Evan Welch and Madisen Beaty.
Writer/director: Paul Thomas Anderson.

Rating: 4.5/5

 

More than any filmmaker working in American cinema today, Paul Thomas Anderson demands his audience’s intellectual involvement. It is a dangerous path to tread and Anderson has paid a commercial price for such lofty ambitions; as universally acclaimed as Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood were, none of them made much theatrical coin (his most critically-divisive film, Punch Drunk Love, made even less).

Such a fate will also most likely befall The Master, his expansive, picaresque slice of American ambition and the tortured individuals who both suffer at its feet and exploit its virtues. However artfully-rendered (and The Master is a work of refined artistry), the intertwined psyches and complex dynamics of a life shared between a half-crippled, spontaneously-violent drunk and a delusional cult-leader con-artist is not the kind of narrative mainstream audiences usually embrace.   

The film’s extended opening stanza is light on plot but rich in character. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) drinks to deal with the responsibility of a late-stage WWII naval life but soon finds his post-traumatic self struggling in a sane society. He stumbles across a cruiser that is hosting a members-only party for family and followers of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a boisterous, corpulent alpha-male whose disciples adhere to the self-awareness techniques outlined in their charismatic overseer’s book, ‘The Cause’.

The directionless Quell is consumed by Dodd’s manipulative mastery; in an extended mid-section that cross-cuts between the stillness of Dodd’s questioning glare and the twisted facade of Quell as he becomes achingly aware of his life’s failings, Anderson’s abstract rhythms peppered with memory-filled mini-flashbacks begin to define the co-dependent nature of the two men. It is the first of two sequences that constitute the methodical psychological breaking down of Quell’s addictive, violent, repressed-memory self.

Viewers not already enthralled by Phoenix’s mannered, mumbling (Brando-esque, if you must) portrayal of Quell will struggle with these sequences; he’s a tough character to like, even when his cold-hearted manipulation by determinedly guarded mentor Dodd reduces him to a bawling wreck (every character’s self-centred devotion to ‘The Cause’ prevents the film from becoming as emotionally engaging as many will pine for over the 137 minute running time).

Anderson has acknowledged that There Will Be Blood was his John Ford/John Huston picture; The Master drifts into Terrence Malick territory (the opening tropical island sequence directly recalls the first moments of The Thin Red Line). Towering above his contemporaries, Anderson has matured incredibly as a craftsman in the relatively short period since the ‘razzle-dazzle’ days of Boogie Nights and Magnolia. His sparse words, too, are acutely attuned to the dark nuances of his characters (including Amy Adams’ steely-eyed wife and protector) and the speech patterns of the 1950s upper-crust Eastern US seaboard setting.

Detractors have called the film too vaguely ambiguous, ploddingly slow or point to characters that are all artifice and construct. For some, there is an icy, heartless chill to the carefully-captured frames that allows for no emotional payoff nor exhibits enough on its mind to warrant Anderson’s and DP Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s stunning images.

But The Master, while probably not Anderson’s ‘best’ film, may be remembered as his most important and unarguably most ambitious. An intimate yet vast story of a damaged man’s self-acceptance at a time when his country was struggling with its own dark, repressed demons and the hope of a brighter future, The Master snapshots that moment when America had a choice - lead or be led. In Phoenix’s classically fallen soul Freddie, Anderson still finds a glimmer of hope in his protagonist’s redemption. The profound sadness of The Master stems not from the horrors of one man’s past life but rather in its capturing of the beginning of his society’s end; a nation’s future, full of potential, forever compromised by a generation’s blind adherence to a false prophet’s lies.