There Will Be Blood was
the first P.T. Anderson film I'd ever seen, way back in 2007, and it
knocked me on my ass. I was enraptured. Five years and six views
later, the film shows a little wear and tear: as if he lost faith in
his audience and their ability to capture his themes, Anderson
hamstrings the film's subtle thematic buildup with a few bloated
expository passages, but by and large, it is an experiment whose
vibrancy and darkness and insanity I cannot help but surrender to
every time. In that regard, I have to wonder if the critical reaction
to The Master serves
as a publicly visible inflation of my own experience. Perhaps it's
all the collective gushing of a group of neophyte movie reviewers who
saw There Will Be Blood and
loved it and are trying to prove as fast as they can that PTA's
newest work is, yes folks, a masterpiece, you read it here first.
Probably this is lazy conjecture.
It
would be unfair to compare The Master to
There Will Be Blood, but
only on the basis that I am a biased party. The films don't seem
particularly similar at a superficial level, but Anderson seems to be
operating on a newfound template, which is sort of an unpleasant
discovery. Lush, shadowy set design and lighting, courtesy of Mihai
Malaimare Jr.'s best Robert Elswit impression. (The film is gorgeous,
its art direction likely its sole inarguable asset.) Discordant
Jonny Greenwood score. Brutal runtime. Exploration of two perverse,
wretched human souls in combative waltz with one another. Operatic
acting, pitch black comedy, inscrutable behavior, the
religious-industrial complex, all forced down with a chaser of
extreme nihilism. The primary difference between the two is The Master's increased presence of women, though with the exception of Amy Adams they're mostly sex objects for the depraved protagonist. I would swear up and down that these are sister
films, or perhaps the first two parts of a "Broken Man
Trilogy," and there's nothing wrong with either of those
possibilities. It just seems a shame that a director who has spent
the better part of two decades cultivating a wildly diverse, bizarre
filmography would then spend five more years reining himself into a
relatively constrictive aesthetic box, taking two different
approaches to fundamentally similar thematic material and then
homogenizing them.
Our guide for Anderson's next plunge into the depths is Joaquin Phoenix as Freddy Quell, a man in his darkest hour. He drinks paint
thinner, chokes rich white dudes, and sleeps indiscriminately with woman after woman until
he meets The silver-tongued sociopath Master himself, Lancaster Dodd.
Dodd, embodied by the perfectly cast and thus somewhat predictable
Philip Seymour Hoffman, spearheads a pseudoscientific system of
belief called The Cause, which is aimed at using hypnotherapy to
induce a sort of time-traveling euphoria in its charges and cure them
of "past traumas." The mechanics of this are repeatedly
debunked throughout the film by skeptic and believer alike, to which
Dodd reacts with manic rage and tips his hand as A Very Irrational
Cult Leader. Not that I'd want to deny anyone the visceral thrill of
watching ol' PSH spit "pig fuck" at someone, but it's a
pretty lazy way to connect the dots. Quell and Dodd are both men of
extremes, men who lash out at everyone around them when their backs
are to the wall, which we are shown again and again to decidedly
diminishing returns. The execution is on point, as always, but this
is the first time I've ever watched a PTA movie and found myself
wishing for a less lenient editor. Assault me once, shame on you,
assault me twice, shame on me, assault me thrice, cut it out
already...
This
urges the question of what I would have preferred to see in the place
of all this excess, and honestly, I don't know. The film is spare
despite its length, and ultimately all it says about religion is that
it fulminates in damaged souls and simply leaves them as damaged
souls trapped in a dogmatic hivemind. If you're looking for a
scathing anti-Scientology screed, something to fulfill all those
Internet rumors of its troubled production, the film issues no direct
attacks on the religion itself and simply makes a few metaphorical
feints at generalized cult practices. Sure, you have the insane
"applications," and Dodd's raving inconsistency, and the
repeated pittance of The Cause against any sort of rational thought,
but these are all things that anyone watching this movie likely knew
about cult belief in the first place.
The
argument could be made that P. T. Anderson was aware of all this when
he made the movie - how couldn't he be? - and that the movie is not
about what it is, but what it is not. That's a tough justification
for something as aesthetically charged and zealously acted and
SIGNIFICANT as The Master,
though. Sure, it's a character study of two men caught in
behavioral, psychic, ideological circles. But two and a half hours of
beautiful, weighty nothingness, whether intentional or not, is going
to come with its advantages and its caveats. The movie casts an
obfuscating haze about itself and its motives, offering plenty of
opportunity for continued study and appreciation, but also rendering
what it really wants to say indeterminate. I don't know what it is; I
wrote this review hoping I could decipher it in the process but I
didn't. I would recommend seeing The Master,
but for selfish reasons, because I just want people to talk with
about it. To see if there's something buried deeper that I haven't
found yet or if it's just hot air.
B-
(?)
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