To relay what Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, The Master, is about would probably take more insight and intelligence than I have at my disposal. Or maybe that’s not true, maybe it’s not necessarily about anything at all, and is just a series of dramatic dialogues that should be taken at face value. I guess this is a round about way of saying that The Master is a movie that’s clearly very skillfully made, has moments than stand up next to the very best of modern art, and flirts with ideas that feel very high-minded and dense. But it’s also a movie that doesn’t tell much of a story, and doesn’t really make much sense. Is this a case of the work Anderson’s doing flying over our heads and being too subtle and too intelligent to get digested after one viewing? Or is it simply a case of a director who’s had a flawless track record up to this point finally making a movie that’s kind of a mess? That seems to be the question that many are wrestling with, and, personally, I’m coming down on the side of The Master being a mess.
To take a stab at summarizing the basic story, I guess you would say that The Master is a movie about two very different men, how their lives intersect, and how their different world views both separate and connect them. Does that sound a little high-minded? Yeah, I think so too, but it is what it is. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is a Navy vet, the sort of guy who got out on the great expanses of the sea and wasn’t able to process its vastness and stay sane. Or maybe he was insane all along and experiencing war atrocities just exasperated the situation... that’s not clear. What is clear is that he’s a ball of uncontrollable impulses with a self-destructive streak a mile wide and a dependency on homemade spirits that are usually more chemical than cocktail.
Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), conversely, is a man who’s always trying to maintain control, both of himself and of others. In fact, some may say that he’s something of a cult leader. His loyal group of followers do refer to him as “Master” after all. Unlike the ignorant and uneducated Quell, Dodd is a man of intellect and refinement. Or, that’s what he would have us believe. The legitimacy of his qualifications is never verified, and he certainly seems to be the type who does whatever he can to project affluence, all while living hand to mouth off the favors of others. When Quell one day stumbles upon a yacht that Dodd is pretending to own, the latter decides to take on the former as a sort of project. Dodd sees Quell both as the ultimate challenge in exerting control over the uncontrollable as well as the perfect test subject to refine the means through which he gets his claws into his followers. The rest of what happens is a push and pull between their disparate personalities as they interact, with the occasional bit of randomness thrown in.
Up until this point, if there had been anything that really defined Anderson as a director, it was the way he meticulously brought every aspect of filmmaking together into a cohesive whole. From the photography, to the casting, to the script, to the musical accompaniment, everything is crafted to seamlessly come together and illuminate what he’s attempting to accomplish with his films. On first glance, The Master is no different. The production design is gorgeous, bringing to life a version of the 50s that is, at the same time, iconic and otherworldly. Everything is all vintage sailor suits and people drinking and smoking, and often it can feel like a Michael Bay film by way of a Popeye cartoon. And, at other times, The Master takes on a vintage and distinguished aesthetic that stands up next to the very best of Mad Men. The music too is always striking and always colors whatever situation it’s playing over. Like he did in There Will Be Blood, Anderson has gotten Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood to do the score, and the stuff he’s come up with is interesting to say the least. The music chosen is strange and random, and often serves to make you feel as off balance and out of control as Quell. At one point we hear what sounds like circus noises combined with Cha-Cha music. Combine this with Anderson’s flair for photography, which always finds beautiful subjects and unique ways to shoot them, and often the sonic and visual feast of The Master is enough to intoxicate.
The performances are revelatory enough to add to this sense of art-inspired enchantment as well. It’s no secret that Hoffman is one of the greatest actors living today, and Phoenix himself has shown flashes of greatness over the course of his career, and the work they do here stands up next to anything else they’ve done before. Phoenix’s protagonist is a fantastically unique character, who right from the start is used to create discomfort in the audience. There’s a scene set on a beach very early on that tells you everything you need to know about Quell. A group of sailors have made a naked lady out of sand, and Quell earns some easy laughs by jumping on top of her and doing some humping. Things quickly take a turn for the creepy, however, when he starts to violate her with his fingers way too intently and way too salaciously, thus creeping everyone out and leading to an awkward silence. All of the scenes where he drinks toxic chemicals are just unsettling in their casualness as well. He’ll lick the rim of a can of paint thinner he’s putting away as naturally as someone will lick cake batter off of a beater, which doesn’t seem like it should play as believable, but in Phoenix’s hands it’s sold and it’s scary.
Hoffman, for his part, is a little less showy but no less ridiculous. He’s the absolute king of whatever he’s doing, whether its selling a wordy monologue, taking a shot of antifreeze, or singing a jaunty tune. There are scenes in this film where he’s projecting authoritarian egomania while at the same time coloring it with hints of crippling insecurity. At this point in his career he’s perfected the slow burn to the incendiary freakout, and this movie gives him plenty of opportunities to suddenly snap on unsuspecting rubes. Every second that he’s on screen is no less than scintillating, and he’s truly proven himself to be one of our national treasures.
The film is never any better than it is in the scenes where Phoenix and Hoffman are acting together and feeding off each other's energies. The scenes where Hoffman is processing (the fictional equivalent of Scientology’s auditing) Phoenix are so tense that they’ll have every cell in your body standing up and saluting. The processing process consists of intense one on one interviews, and one in which Hoffman forces Phoenix to answer rapid fire questions all while never blinking is so intense that it could be completely satisfying standing on its own as a short film. Another scene, where the two men become incarcerated and each react to the situation in polar opposite ways while inhabiting adjoining cells, is similarly rich enough to stand on its own as a piece of filmmaking worth watching. Phoenix and Hoffman’s characters become so well established and their motivations so well developed that they start to resemble some of the great vaudeville-era comedy teams. Just put them next to each other and they’ll produce gold.
The problem with the film overall, is that despite the fact that there are a number of standalone scenes so affecting that they border on transcendent, the disparate pieces never come together to create a cohesive whole. There is no narrative flow, no building of tension, and no clear goal that the film is moving toward at any point. Somewhere in the second act there’s a sequence where Dodd has Quell walking back and forth between a wall and a window, touching them and describing what he feels, over and over again, to the point of extreme frustration. It goes on forever, and its only purpose seems to be an establishing of the fact that Dodd is breaking Quell down and attempting to take control of him, much in the same way a dragon is taken control of in a monologue he delivers earlier in the film. That’s all well and good, but does the audience need to be broken down with him in order for us to understand what’s happening? There are long stretches of this film that are just plain boring, and the fact that they’re sat next to scenes that are absolutely captivating just works to reinforce what an uneven and frustrating experience watching The Master can be.
The slow moments might have been forgiven if everything had built to a mind-blowing climax that brought the film’s disparate elements together in unanticipated ways, but that’s not the case at all. The climax of the film is a scene in which Phoenix and Hoffman’s characters confront each other, once again, after a couple of years apart. Far from feeling like this was a big moment that the whole film had been building toward, I found myself wondering at what point the two had even drifted apart. The chronology of this movie, the timeline of how far apart its various events happen from each other and how they affect each other, is never made clear in any way. Everything that we’re presented with is jumbled, which may be a stylistic decision that puts us in the mindset of Phoenix’s character, but it still leaves us confused and disoriented. The reuniting of Quell and Dodd after they’ve been apart for years is treated as something to be excited about, but ultimately it hits with no impact whatsoever, because nothing of any real consequence happens over the course of the entire film.
The Master features some great acting, some great photography, and a few sequences that could have stood alone as interesting shorts, but a feature film comes with different expectations than a short. If a short can get across one idea, evoke one emotion, then it can be considered a success. A feature film has the responsibility of bringing all of its elements together and creating a whole that’s worth your dedicating several hours to. The Master doesn’t accomplish this at all, and instead exists as an epic, ambitious attempt at creating something great that ultimately only achieves the status of beautiful disaster.
