Masterclass, Mastercut: A Review of The Master

I wish to make it a ritual to review the best film of the year every year. I reviewed The Tree of Life last year, I’m reviewing The Master now, and hopefully films in 2013 will live up to the ever-higher standards being set by the prodigies so I can keep my ritual alive.

But what makes The Master the best film of the year? To be honest, it’s ridiculous to call one film the best film of the year, or one filmmaker the best filmmaker of all time. It’s equally ridiculous to rank and sort them in any order. I’ve been guilty of both. I’m guilty despite telling myself constantly that the best kind of list you could ever draw is a group of great directors, or a group of great films, as a collective, as all within that group being equal in worth and value. But giving my personal hypocrisy the backseat, since my inclination (and time) to review only one film aligns with the idea of prizing one film as the best of the year, I will use this overlap to my benefit.

Dianetics I thought was peculiar. Now I don't think it's any more peculiar than a lot of the things out there. - Paul Thomas Anderson

This is a film 10 years in the making. Or, in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s words, the better part of 10 years spent with “a character searching for a story.” He wanted to make a film on a character very loosely based on the cult leader of Dianetics (later rechristened Scientology), L. Ron Hubbard, and another character, an emotionally wounded navy soldier (victim of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, called back in the 50s as “shellshock”) returning from his duties, and this character was heavily based on the government-sactioned-and-later-government-banned documentary*  called Let ThereBe Light that the legendary director John Huston made in 1946 on the real shellshocked navy soldiers returning from WW-II. Anderson only had these two characters to begin with, and imagined a quasi-romance story between them, as he still refers to the film as a romance (in a totally non-gay way).

Lancastar Dodd, the Master played to perfection by Anderson’s long-time acting collaborator Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Freddie Quin, improvised beyond Anderson’s directions by the highly eccentric and equally underrated Joaquin Phoenix, find in each other a magnetic subliminal attraction that is charged with nuances of many kinds of relationships: master-apprentice, father-son, spiritual leader- protégé, sometimes even interrogator-interrogatee. The attraction is so strongly felt that the very first time Dodd meets Quin he reveals to him, “...but above all, I am man, just like you, hopelessly inquisitive” and goes on to write the whole night inspired by him. This attraction is reciprocated by Quin as he becomes aggressively, violently defensive of Dodd, in addition to having his own fits of eruptive rage, against anyone who dares to question Dodd’s authority or doubt his teachings or so much as tries to arrest him for fraud, including against Dodd’s own son. Their dedication to each other intensifies as the film progresses, getting stranger and darker by the minute, and descends into a maddening vortex of misplaced loyalty. The film reaches its darkest season at its climax, and without giving away any spoilers, in Anderson’s words, neither of them transform each other, nothing changes, there's no epiphany, and they both end up exactly where they started. The line I liked the most in this climax, which to me was a highlight of the film, was Dodd to Quinn: “If I meet you in my next life, you will be my sworn enemy.” He means it. He believes it.

The character of Amy Adams, Peggy Dodd, is a lurking presence throughout the film.  In fact, to make that invisible lurking possible through Freddie Quinn, Anderson shot all the scenes involving her and Quinn at the very beginning of the shooting schedule, so that her grip on him would spill into the scenes not involving her.  And Anderson has been very vocal about just how much improvisation Phoenix did on his own, almost to the extent that Heath Ledger did on the Joker in TDK, even vocalizing that he wished he had written as good a character on paper as Phoenix turned him into. From the caveman-like posture** to speaking through the side of his lips, from the intensity of psychotic breakdowns to spontaneous dialogues, Phoenix took creative control of his character in a way most directors don’t allow their actors, but proves worthy of that liberty all the same (this possibly being the reason Anderson has taken him onboard for the lead of his next film, an adaptation of the latest novel by the pioneering architect of postmodern literature, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice).

I reserve a special note for Phillip Seymour Hoffman, because, while his character was only thematically (and loosely) based on L. Ron Hubbard, according to Hoffman it was physically partly based on Orson Welles – and I did feel that the tonality of the voice, the upright stance, the towering personality and the power of assertion were all familiar but I couldn’t pin down one name until I heard Hoffman mention Welles as (only) one of the characters Dodd sits on. Anybody who knows me knows how freakishly obsessed I am with Welles, so it gives me, in addition to all the other reasons for liking it, another reason to like it.

The cinematography, and the cinematographer, were a first-time experience for Anderson. His career-long cinematographer Robert Elswit was unavailable to shoot this film, so Anderson collaborated with Mihai Malaimare, Francis Coppola’s DP, to experiment on a new look for the film using the long-abandoned 70 mm film reel. The last film to use such extensive usage of the 70 mm format was Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 adaptation of Hamlet. But because the 1970s generation of filmmakers is so romantically attached to film, they refuse to upgrade to digital except during editing. There’s good and bad reasons behind their refusal, but at least when it comes to The Master, I’m glad that the reasons are mostly good. Anderson says “there’s so much more that can be done with 70 mm,” that it hasn’t run its course and can still be experimented with, which is what he tried to do here, along with experimentation with light and color. The resulting imagery is nothing short of a spectacle. Even if one finds the emotions of the film alienating, it would do well to sit through it just to enjoy to striking display of photography. One can also see the experimental nature of the music by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead, who also scored to the most original sound of There Will Be Blood, but if there were just one complaint I had with the film, it was that the music didn’t integrate so well in The Master as it did in TWBB. There was some disconnect that I could feel, a disconnect clearly unintended.

A review of The Master without commenting on Scientology is of course incomplete. I used to wonder, given Tom Cruise’s famed affiliation with Church of Scientology, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s collaboration with him in Magnolia, would this be a falling out between the two? To the contrary Anderson stated in more than one interview that he did screen the film for Tom Cruise after it was complete and that they had a “healthy discussion” about it. My interpretation of ‘healthy discussion’ is that no death threats were issued or exchanged, but regardless, Anderson has made no secret of the fact that the shadow of Church of Scientology was felt throughout the filming process. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Scientology orchestrated the infamous Operation Snow White in the 70s to erase all IRS documents related to Scientology and were prosecuted, part of which inspired the scene in the film in which Dodd is arrested for tax fraud. Nevertheless, Anderson captures decidedly anti-Scientology undercurrents that flow through the film even at its brightest moments as it does in its darkest.

To spare you the overkill pun, The Master is most certainly a masterpiece, forging Paul Thomas Anderson’s name into film history’s hall of fame of genre-defining, style-obsessed filmmakers. It’s a film that not only requires multiple viewings, but gets better each time you watch it. That’s a hallmark of Kubrick, but extending beyond a mere hallmark, this film takes Kubrick’s dream of making a film on the cult and the occult, a dream which he had since the 80s but did not succeed too well with Eyes Wide Shut, and turns it into a reality that Kubrick wished he could have.

I wonder who the real Master in the film is.

___________________

* The backstory to this ban is filled with irony. John Huston was sanctioned by the US government to make a trilogy of documentaries about the soldiers returning from war in an effort to convince the American public that the soldiers were in good health and happy to do it all over again for their country, and also in an effort to recruit more soldiers into the army. The documentaries were meant to glorify the army and possibly war. John Huston made the third film, Let There Be Light, with the intention of showing Americans that even the most emotionally wounded soldiers of the war were perfectly capable of local and industrial employment after their return back home. But Huston’s good intentions flipped when the first reaction of anybody who watched this documentary was that they would NOT employ those soldiers, thereby serving the irony, and it only made the war effort look really bad. The government thus took it upon itself, since it was the producer, to ban it for more than three decades, and it was released sometime in the 80s. Paul Thomas Anderson had a moment of love-at-first-sight when he watched this documentary in the 2000s and instantly knew that’s the character who would lead his story. You can see clear references to this documentary in the early scenes of the film where Freddie Quin is on a lookout for a job on his return from the navy and is surrounded by questions of re-employment.

** Anderson handed over a documentary on apes to Phoenix for "character research," and Phoenix brought in the ape-like body language.

Tweet