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.