Film Review: The Master

The Master is a big film for Joaquin Phoenix. It’s his first appearance since fall-out of his fake documentary I’m Still Here, in which he faked a mental breakdown and aspirations towards a rap career. It was an ultra-dedicated piece of method acting which could have exorcised him from Hollywood. His role as Freddie Quell, a drifter ex-marine who falls in with a religious cult, needed to be fantastic, to re-establish his place as one of his generation’s best actors, and Phoenix does indeed play the role exceedingly well. His Freddie is a tightened coil of a man, constantly hunched, as if crushed by a physical injury sustained during the Second World War (of which he is a veteran), or by deeper emotional toils. His face is constantly contorted into a snarl, and he mumbles most of his lines in a Massachusetts drawl. He is ugly, in every sense of the word.  

The Master is also a big film for Paul Thomas Anderson. Like Phoenix he has been away from the limelight for a few years, emerging now to write, direct and produce the follow up his 2009 masterpiece There Will Be Blood. Regarded as one of the best films of the last decade, it would be a hard act to follow for anyone, but Anderson has a greater weight of a career-long run of excellent films to uphold. Again, like Phoenix, his work on The Master accomplishes this task, directing a film with extraordinary depth, both in content, as well as visually. Unfortunately I was unable to see the film in the intended 90mm version, but even the 'standard' print looks gorgeous. There is a pervasive sense of sadness around the film, as Anderson invites us to pity both of the main characters in turn.   

He again returns to a theme that has become as familiar a trademark of his films as expertly crafted tracking shots –the father-son relationship. The patriarch of The Master is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), figurehead of ‘The Cause’, a cult which believes that a person’s current life is pre-determined by past-existences from thousands of years before. Like Phoenix, Hoffman gives a terrific performance (as does Amy Adams, playing Dodd’s wife Peggy). He delivers his solo scenes, the sermons extolling the theories of The Cause, with the magnetic fervour typical of film’s religious zealots (powerful, but not alienating), but his best scenes are those when he is one-on-one with Freddie. Theirs, like many of the father-son relationships in Anderson’s films, is a tense one, based on fear, or need, as much as love. It is an obsession; a need to conquer the other, a conquest which they believe will help the other. Think of the warring relationship between Daniel and Eli in There Will Be Blood. Dodd believes that he can be the saviour of the wayward Freddie, and adopts him with a view to making him a project for The Cause, a test of their true redemptionary powers.

 

Dodd first finds Quell drunk a yacht where the former is hosting his daughter’s wedding (as well as allowing The Cause some time away from the ‘attacks’ detailed by Peggy – dissenters, non-believers, and Lancaster’s ex-wives). Quell has fled from a farmer where he worked briefly as a land labourer. An elderly man drank some of his homemade alcohol (one of several toxic blends Freddie makes throughout the film, using everything from paint thinner to torpedo fuel) as died. Before this Freddie worked in an upper-class department store as a photographer, which gave his access to further chemicals he can use as intoxicants, and offered him teasing glimpses of perfect families captured on film.

As stated above, much of the film focuses on the interactions between Freddie and Lancaster. Some of the most gripping scenes of the film, (the same ones which are the most uncomfortable, for this is an uncomfortable film) are a back-and-forward between the two men. Soon after they first meet Lancaster tapes an interrogation by him of Freddie, where he grills him about his view of life, as well as his sexual relationship with his aunt. Lancaster forces Freddie to undergo a form of past life regression therapy (the practices of The Cause appear to be mainly a cherry picking of this and parts of a Buddhist circle of life theory), but, unlike other characters in the film who take part in this, he asks Freddie to think about Dorris, his pre-war love.

Despite this focus on the paternal relationship, Anderson still devotes time (the film is drenched in detail, and strains to fit in even its two hour-plus running time) to explore The Cause, and the insular workings of a cult. Once Freddie meets them, it films hands itself over completely (flashbacks aside) to the group. Dodd’s biological son Val, for example, at one point denounces his father’s theories, and claims they are made up on the spot. After this scene he disappears from the film, only re-appearing when he returns to the fold once again, at The Causes’ England-based school. This is similar to the way that real-life cults work – when you get in, you are always in. If you leave, you are forgotten about. It is at this point that doubts about Lancaster and The Cause begin to seep in. Freddie begins a flirtation with scepticism, and Lancaster is slowly revealed as a fraud, and as a much weaker man than he imagines himself to be.

Similarly, the theories of The Cause are presented to outsiders (the audience) as nonsense. Anderson refrains from any detailed explanation of Lancaster’s writings, leaving us to pick up odds and ends as they are dropped in front of the camera. What is clear is that it is a theory obsessed with metaphysics, and of the ‘journey’ which a person takes throughout their many lives. Another part of the teachings are important to the role of the cult in the film in general – the clear superiority of men to animals. Men, Lancaster states, are not animals, and animalistic actions – like flatulence – are to be looked down upon.

As a war veteran, Quell has seen some inhumane - some animalistic - things. He suffers from some kind of mental disorder, which is not specified, but inferred it may be some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This goes some way to explain his often-sociopathic behaviour. In the opening beach scene, for example, he starts dry-humping a woman rendered from sand by his fellow sailors. They laugh, but the scene, and Freddie, drag on, as he becomes more graphic and intense in his pleasuring of the sand-woman. Later he lies down with it, as if enjoying a post-coital hug. His is oblivious to their disgust and confusion, or least does not care (another credit to Phoenix's performance is the way he portrays Freddie's disorder in a way that avoids the typical Hollywood tropes of verbal tics, or being able to count cards). His job as a store cameraman exposes him to family life, and to happiness he cannot attain. His past, be it in the war or before that, haunts him, and has reduced him to a shell of a man, on the run and alcohol dependant. In this scenario, religion becomes a safety net, a shelter, and, as Marx stated, 'the heart of a heartless world'. Marx believed that embracing religion was actually a cry for help, and that religious belief was not a barrier to a socialist society, but a sign that this society was needed, even if the people did not yet know it.

Anderson's films, as obsessed as they are with warped representations of the family unit, often allow themselves to spread out into analysis of a wider situation. There Will Be Blood explores the growth of greed and capitalism in America, Boogie Nights looks at the morality, and the negative effects of, the porn industry. The Master is an exploration of the abandoning of war veterans, and their various coping strategies. The film was apparently inspired by Anderson reading that post-war societies are particularly susceptible to new forms of organised religion. Set in 1950, The Master captures a period of American history where the hangover of the most brutal war in world history remained, albeit below the surface. Around this time, many of the men who were mentally scared by the deaths and bloodshed may have realised that they were not getting any better, and that their PTSD was not subsiding. Destruction on such an epic scale removed the barrier of civilisation between men and animals, reducing life to a dangerously pointless exercise. What The Cause offered Freddie, in this context, is obvious.