Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master' (2nd review)

"You just can't live straight, can you?" says a character to Freddie Quell, the all-but unhinged protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson's new film, The Master. Since the speaker is the wife of a cult leader given to mind control, rotgut binges and berserker motorcycle rides in the Arizona desert, the notion of "straight" is a little problematic.

This is as it should be, or at any rate is in Anderson's films, which include the well-known There Will Be Blood, whose sociopathic hero, a turn-of-the-20th Century oil entrepreneur, was far scarier than the nightmare characters of any half-dozen horror films.

The Master, shot (unusually) in 65mm film, likewise centers— as far as it does center— on an equally dubious character, the charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose name is dropped once or twice, including by the police who arrest him in one scene in suburban Philadelphia, but who is otherwise referred to as "The Master."

Hubbard's quackery

The Master's shtick involves the belief that the Earth was populated by space aliens who arrived trillions of years ago and whose descendants we are, each of us having lived through countless cycles of birth and death. Our job is to reach our inner alien, while shedding the neuroses and hangups accumulated in intervening lives.

The Master, who has reached a perfected state, is our guide through this space-time labyrinth, leading us through close questioning and hypnosis to inner liberation and external success. He's an American Barnum, and Hoffman plays him with unctuous sanctity yet puckish charm.

Dodd's character and doctrine are clearly based on the late L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Anderson could be giving us a riff on one of the all-time American quacks, to be placed in the same gallery as Charles Foster Kane or Howard Hughes; and his film, trailing glory from the Venice Festival and (though barely a month into its American release) already acquiring cult status, certainly offers a clinically observed view of cult dynamics and the particular fascination that the prophet-charlatan holds in American culture.

But that approach would be entirely too straight, and too simple, for an Anderson film. Instead, the director frames the whole setup around the "minor" character of Freddie, an alcoholic and certifiably psychotic drifter who has been further damaged by battle experience in World War II, and who, stumbling drunkenly onto Dodd's yacht as it is about to cruise from San Francisco to New York, stays to become an acolyte.

Complacent consumers

The film's earliest scenes all concern Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix, an immensely gifted actor making his first screen appearance in years). They show him, in the last, languid days of the Pacific campaign, frolicking with his half-stripped buddies on the shore of a nameless but apparently well-secured island.

Freddie has fashioned himself a life-size female sand doll, and, after throwing himself hungrily on it, goes off to finish masturbating by the water's edge while his buddies indifferently jog or play about him. Obviously, Freddie is cut from a different mold, and the scene is both naturalistic and bizarre— that Anderson touch.

Mustered out, Freddie employs his one skill, photography— a job that calls for precisely the focus and concentration he seems to lack— until he attempts to first singe and then strangle a department-store sitter. The store setting enables Anderson to play his subject's lunacy off the façade of postwar consumer complacency.

Homoerotic undertones

Descending the economic ladder, Freddie finds himself chased out of a migrant labor camp (another view of the American Dream) before landing with Dodd. The two of them form an unlikely bond, cemented by Freddie's potent formula for hooch cut with paint thinner. Dodd acquires a lavish but well-concealed taste for this concoction, and his imbibing sessions with Freddie relieve the dullness of a voyage with a boatload of disciples.

Freddie displays no overt homoerotic inclination— he ignores the bodies on his Pacific beach for his sand female, and he has a teenage sweetheart, much his junior, back home— while Dodd comes equipped with a wife (Amy Adams), son and daughter. Nonetheless, the sexual tension between the two men is palpable, culminating in an exuberant wrestling match in front of a porch full of witnesses and, in their final encounter, in Dodd's singing a teary rendition of "Slow Boat to China" for Freddie.

It's as freakishly tender a love scene as you'll ever wish to see, with a seated Dodd serenading Freddie from behind his desk Ó la Fred Astaire crooning soulfully at Ginger Rogers. In the hands of any other director, or perhaps any other actors, such a scene would be simply a hoot, but Anderson convinces us that something deeply tragic is transpiring.

Not since Brando

Hoffman's Dodd is a slyly shaded and wonderfully realized performance that would walk off with any Oscar in sight. But Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie (a role originally slated for Jeremy Renner) is a one-off rarely attempted in American film since Brando, and Brando himself could have learned a thing or two from Phoenix's hunched, explosive physicality.

Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood evoked something of the same blank-visaged intensity; but Phoenix, with a far more limited and crippled character, projects a truly frightening sense of violence, tempered by episodes of docility, that explores very dark depths in the American psyche.

This nightmare vision may be what Anderson is after in the end, and Hoffman's Dodd— a manic figure in his own right— may ultimately be the vision's foil. Anderson's script, it is said, developed only slowly, and without any worked-out plot.

Caught in a funhouse mirror

You won't, in any case, find a neatly packaged story in an Anderson film. He uses external narrative as a means to navigate the quirks and extremities of character that primarily interest him, and which redound back on the narrative in shape-shifting forms. It's a little like being caught in a funhouse mirror whose image never comes clear, but that accompanies a strange and often terrifying ride.

You could take The Master as the story of a burned-out World War II vet suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or of a master con man merrily weaving a web of deception. But neither of these story lines entirely fits.

Dodd's son Val (Jesse Plemons) tells Freddie at one point that his father is just making it all up as he goes along— and that plausibly speaks for Anderson too. But each scene is diamond-clear, and if the whole seems less than the sum of its parts, that's the one thing that seems to be entirely by design. An Anderson film isn't about solving puzzles, but creating them.

Back to the '50s

One more point to be noted: The Master, like last year's Terrence Malick film, The Tree of Life, is set in the America of the late '40s and early '50s. Both films are meticulous in their recreation of period style and dress, and each in different ways alludes to the UFO phenomenon that gained such a cultural purchase on the postwar era.

It seems that the most searching of our filmmakers have found in that moment, rather than the turbulent '60s that followed, the matrix of modern America. Malick was raised in it, but Anderson looks back to it.

In the shadow of the Bomb, Americans went shopping, and sometimes quietly mad. The early Kubrick caught something of that sensibility too, and in his 2001:A Space Odyssey he also took his space fling.

Certainly the postwar period was the apex of the American empire, when we bestrode the planet as an economic and military colossus, casting our power on every continent yet doubting ourselves and fearing the atomic Frankenstein we had created. It was the era of the American Dream (a phrase not actually coined until 1971), but also what Henry Miller called the air-conditioned nightmare.

Now that the nightmare is firmly in the saddle in ways we never imagined, we go back to the '50s to see where the Dream went wrong— or, rather, what was wrong with it all along.♦


To read another review by Susan Beth Lehman, click here.
To read a response, click here.