Master Acting In "The Master"

Late in the summer I sought out The Master to witness an acclaimed director, Paul Thomas Anderson, do his thing with two of the most interesting actors around, Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The result seems a bit ... experimental.

Like most PTA films (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights), this one does get inside you and worm its way around, leaving you vaguely discomfited. The question with The Master is whether this is discomfort for discomfort's sake or whether there is actually any There there.

The Master is not as satisfying as There Will Be Blood -- because though Daniel Day Lewis' Daniel Plainview character is over the top in greed and intensity, we as indoctrinated Americans understand intuitively the Old West, up-by-your-bootstraps, greedy business maverick, Citizen Kane, rags-to-riches-to-wretchedness narrative. By contrast The Master forces the audience to work harder to co-author its intent. For one thing, we Americans tend to frown on the idea of cults and charlatans in anything but comedies or cautionary tales. So culturally, the character of The Master -- though played by Hoffman as an avuncular humanist -- is not sympathetic. Further, we expect our villains -- for as brilliantly portrayed as Phoenix can make him, Quell is a villain -- to get their comeuppance. Because of this, the film is a curiosity and offers no real tension. It has a great premise, but squanders it. Depending on what you go to the cinema for, it seems The Master has limited payoff.

For no real reason is Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell an immature, sex obsessed, badly socialized alcoholic who previously had unseemly congress with an aunt, romanced an adolescent neighbor, and survives WWII with all his quirks intact -- including an ability to concoct moonshine from found and frequently toxic ingredients. The film tries to posit Phoenix as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but my impression was that he went to war a weirdo. And Phoenix makes him frightening -- unpredictable, strange, menacing, violent, vulnerable, and both romantic and fatalistic. It's a tour de force piece of acting, because when he is on screen you can't relax. His Quell is a psychopath.

And for no real reason -- other than a fondness for moonshine and lost causes -- does the Lancaster Dodd character take the volatile Quell under his wing. Portraying The Master of the title, Hoffman's Dodd is a self-crowned crusader of new age thinking and therapy called The Cause that is along the lines of Dianetics, and in some ways he is as maladjusted as Quell. He is self-important, manipulative, eccentric, and didactic. He is also loving, supportive, forward-thinking, and vulnerable. His Cause has developed a significant following, and Dodd is genuinely devoted to teaching his flock how to plumb the depths of their existence to find their own truths. How much of the Cause is b.s. -- and how much Dodd knows that it's b.s. -- is addressed but barely in the story.

Without inwardly being altered or renewed by the teachings Quell nevertheless becomes so outwardly committed to the Cause that he physically retaliates against any detractors. This brazen volatility threatens the Cause's legitimacy, already being questioned by the press. However, few consequences are doled out to Freddie for his acts of violence (one scene has both Freddie and Lancaster jailed for resisting the police, but Freddie is not prosecuted for the beatdowns he delivers). Quell's character is well developed, but he has no arc in terms of change. We simply view a series of events in their lives. Neither of these characters seem profoundly changed through their relationship -- they are simply co-dependent until Dodd decides that Quell is too much of a liability to the continued operations of The Cause.

The film is really a study of the unique and uneven bond between a pair of diametrically opposed misfits. It's a cautionary tale about the mentor-mentee relationship. It's about blind belief. It's about loneliness and the need to belong, the need to create family from those around you. In a way, it's about the less-cinematic and less uplifting realities of human nature. In classic film narratives, most protagonists undergo a physical and/or emotional journey in which they come to some profound revelation and thus change their behaviors for good or for ill. The journey transforms them. A lesson is learned -- by the protagonist, the audience, or both. However, there is no such transformation for Freddie or for Lancaster in this film. And in that sense, The Master is a frustratingly empty excercise. We wonder why we just spent three hours watching.

The answer is to have the privilege of watching Phoenix and Hoffman do the most powerful and astonishing acting of their entire careers. And to glory in the pristine beauty and gargantuan proportions of 70-millimeter film, rendering many of the shots iconic in composition.

And that may well be director Anderson's point.

12 Things I Learned Watching "Skyfall"

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We love James Bond, oh yes we do. We're the ones who put the 24th film in the franchise at the top of the Box Office earners list on opening weekend during its highly touted 50th anniversary year. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone says it's a Top Five Bond film of all time. Roger Ebert says it's the best Bond flick in years, calling it "a full-blooded, joyous, intelligent celebration of a beloved cultural icon."

So now, a week after its opening, you've already seen it. If you haven't I'd say check it out, it's entertaining and delves deeper into the mythology of Bond than previous films. Don't want to offer any spoilers, but in no particular order here are

TWELVE THINGS I LEARNED WATCHING SKYFALL:

1. Bond never dies.
Nor does he age significantly. I know, obvious after so many films. He's just on vacation until the next assignment. Or until Mommy calls. More on this below.

2.You can never go home again.
Particularly if you are into high-stakes international espionage with a well-financed, p.o.'ed shadow on your tail. Because said home is guaranteed to go up in smoke, and that's a shame -- even if it is an isolated Scottish estate with more foreboding atmosphere than ten Wuthering Heights and enough bad memories to launch a legion of malcontents, it's still purty.

3. A bad bleached blonde dye job is the first indication of a mental break.
Particularly in a male. It will lead to instant villainy, delusions of grandeur, and a quest for world domination. Some people just shouldn't go blonde (that means you, Javier Bardem) and when they do, bad things will happen.

4. Javier Bardem can never top Anton Chigurh.
I have loved Bardem since I saw him portray a quadraplegic, basketball-playing former cop in Pedro Almodovar's Live Flesh in 1997. He is a gifted actor and he was a decent nemesis here. I hope he won't now be typecast into accented villain roles because he was so fabulous in No Country For Old Men, in which his Chigurh was so creepy, delusional, unpredictable and pathological that he made all of us suspect every stranger we'll ever meet again.

5. Take the shot.
Good life philosophy. Even when things go wrong, at least you tried.

6. You can overcome a weird and funny name (Moneypenny).
It's best to prove your mettle at some really dangerous gig first -- say, tracking assassins with high-powered weaponry and stunt driving in foreign countries -- before your name is ever uttered. Even if you put that aside and take a desk job later, no one will doubt that you mean business. This has nothing to do with race or sex. Develop a series of snappy double entendres to trade with your favorite agents just to prove you've still got it.

7. M stands for "Mommy."
Or "Mum" as her agents call her in the British approximation of "ma'am." I love Judi Dench as an actress, and in Skyfall we get to see a lot of her as M, and she's been running things at MI6 for a while and facing some life-changing ish. (Spoiler alert: We know a man succeeds her, but his M may well stand for something else.)

Corollary 1: As such, M's agents have some serious Mommy issues. We don't know if M has children of her own, but she knows how to manipulate her underlings emotionally and physically like the best Oedipal nightmare. Bardem's rogue agent Silva actually whines something like "mom loved you best!" OK, he doesn't actually say that. But he implies nastily that 007 is indisputably M's favorite.

Corollary 2: Further, "orphans make the best agents." The better for M to assume that maternal role in their lives. (Mere protocols keep her from making the covert calls asking, Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?" a la the nightmare political mom in The Manchurian Candidate.)

8. If there are Komodo Dragons anywhere on the premises...
... and it is not a highly secure, national zoo, keep Murphy's law in mind.

9. Bond girls are still (sort of) eye candy.
Women in the Bond franchise have become increasingly lethal and pivotal outside the bedroom (and less laughable -- remember Christmas Jones, pint-sized rocket scientist?). Halle Berry kicked ass in Die Another Day as NSA agent Jinx, but she also appeared in a bikini. Neither Naomie Harris as Moneypenny nor Bérénice Lim Marlohe appear in anything more suggestive than an evening gown (though Severine's does employ some strategically placed sheer net panels), and the Skyfall plot does turn on their character's actions. But the new Bond storylines are more politically correct than in the past, stripping away one of the traditional personality traits of our hero: Womanizer extraordinaire. It was this user mentality that allowed Bond to do what he does. Whenever he gets touchy feely and falls in love, the franchise founders.

10. James Bond is a fist with eyes.
The third time is the charm, and Daniel Craig has definitely settled into the role of Bond with Skyfall. Thanks to his casting, the iconic 007 no longer looks like an upper-crust smoothie who'd rather crack wise than crack heads. He may show up in a tuxedo, but for this Bond there are no martinis in sight (OK -- he has one but doesn't speak the immortal "shaken not stirred" line) and he speaks only when necessary. While the films stress that he went to Oxford, this Bond looks like a wiry bare-knuckles brawler who'd as soon snap your neck as look at you. (I miss the witty repartee and double entendres of the Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan films, when there was a bit of irony, camp, and cleverness to the proceedings. Now we have a new Bond for a new generation: mostly threats and explosions.)

Corollary: And he has elf ears.
Daniel Craig wouldn't look out of place in Rivendell, is all I'm saying. You know, in the kickass archery corps fighting Orcs or something.

11. Top-secret government lists of undercover agents have a way of getting into the wrong hands.
Wasn't that the whole premise of the first Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise? The whole "knock list" debacle? I know, I know, a whole movie genre would be wiped out if this possibility didn't exist. But there's gotta be another way, people.

12. Adele RULES.
So let the sky fall/when it crumbles/ we will stand tall/face it all together at Skyfall backed by a 70-piece orchestra is just heaven. I dare you not to hum it on your way out of the theater.