The Master - Masterful?

The Master was released to a huge amount of anticipation in art house circles last year.  This was to be another masterpiece from director Paul Thomas Anderson.  After the critical and commercial success of There will be Blood the film literati were expecting great things.  With interesting ideas and a strange trailer that included great music from Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood and seemed to hint at themes of religious indoctrination and cult behaviour, plus with a great cast, I was eager to see it.

I missed it in the cinema as I thought it was going to end up being very long and so I stayed away.  Turns out it was only just over 2 hours long when I watched it on DVD last week.  The Master stars Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell, a loner, drifter, layabout and drunk who after emerging from WW2 in the Pacific embarks on a series of dead-end jobs before unwittingly stowing aboard a ship heading through the Panama canal for the US east coast.  On board are Lancaster Dodd, aka 'The Master' played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, his much younger wife Peggy (Amy Adams) and entourage - all of whom are followers of Dodd's mysterious 'Cause'.

It is quickly revealed to us that The Cause is a kind of self-help method, in which Dodd claims that all people are merely vessels for souls that have lasted trillions of years.  He claims to have a method that allows people to search through their past lives and through it understand their current situation.  Quell appears fascinated by these ideas, and quickly submits to being 'processed' by Dodd, which involves Dodd asking him a relentless barrage of penetrating questions while drinking copious quantities of some sort of home-made hooch that Quell has conjured up.  Quell becomes an integral part of Dodd's organisation, and it is the tension between Dodd, his family, Quell and the various people that they interact with through The Cause that forms the major arc of the film.

The film left me with a distinct feeling of 'what happened?' and 'what was that all about then?'.  This is despite it having a lot of interesting themes, a strong one being the power of the cult and the misuse of science.  Dodd's cause is more cult than science, and there are clear allusions to the cult of Scientology.  There are a lot of snippets that different people might pick up on in The Master.  It's possible that the film is a comment on the dangers of traumatic stress disorder, or maybe about the nature of power in cult-like organisations, or perhaps even it's warning about the dangers of substance abuse.  It's very similar to There Will Be Blood in that there are lots of themes you could probably make a coherent case for each film being 'about'.  The difference between this and There Will Be Blood is that the latter has a gripping storyline with some amazing-looking cinematography, whereas this doesn't really have anything like that.  Don't misunderstand me here, The Master is a very interesting and thought-provoking film, but it isn't much fun to watch.  Which is something I normally like my films to be.

What is beyond doubt is that Joaquin Phoenix provides an acting master-class.  His performance is full of weird facial tics and vocal outbursts that make him at one moment look like a man on a mission, then the next a hopeless waster.  It was no surprise that he lost out to Daniel Day Lewis at the Oscars, but he should have won and hopefully will be back.  After three nominations now they have to give him to top prize eventually.

Next up will be my latest cinema trip - Side Effects.