The
Master
Apparently,
it’s not really about the Xenu-botherers…honest!
If
you can’t wait the two weeks until it opens nationwide and you’re planning to
go see The Master this week when it opens in all its 70mm glory in just one London
cinema, why not take a bottle with you and play The Master drinking gameä!
Vodka.
Gin.
Whisky
maybe.
But
not the good stuff. Leave the
single malt at home. We’re talking
supermarket own-brand rotgut. The
really cheap, nasty, value stuff.
Some Pholcodine Cough Linctus would also probably hit the spot too. Or maybe some raki. Absinthe. No mixers though, nothing to dilute the booze and make it
more palatable. Something strong,
something that’ll make you wince, something that’ll make you pull a face as you
drink it. If you really want to
get into the swing of things, take a leaf from The Master’s central character Freddie
Quell’s (Joaquin Phoenix) cocktail recipe book and try some paint thinner, anti-freeze and
torpedo fuel.
The
rules are simple. As you watch the
film, every time Freddie takes a drink, you take a drink. Every time Freddie utters a line of
intelligible dialogue, you take a drink.
See if you can make it to the end of the film without puking your guts
up. Don’t worry about missing
major plot-points. There aren’t
any.
Our
tale begins in 1945 with the Second World War ending and troubled war veteran
Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) being medically discharged from the US Navy. We know Freddie’s troubled because when
we first meet him he’s making moonshine out of a liquid (Fuel? Anti-freeze?) he drains from the
warheads of torpedoes, furiously wanking over the idealised sand sculpture of a
woman some of his shipmates have made and turning up pissed and unintelligible
to his psychiatric evaluation with the Navy shrink.
Fast-forward
a couple of years and Freddie’s still pissed but now he’s a department store
photographer who drinks his own developing fluid. One fight with a customer later and Freddie’s working as an
itinerant cabbage picker and accidentally poisoning his immigrant co-workers
with his homemade hooch. Homeless,
jobless and on the bum, Freddie’s fortunes may just be looking up when he stows
away aboard the yacht of self-styled barefaced messiah, the titular Master,
Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who tells Freddie: "I am a
writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a theoretical philosopher. But above all, I am a man, a hopelessly
inquisitive man, just like you."
Founder
of his own thinly-veiled Scientology-style cult, The Cause, Dodd is fascinated
by Freddie and submits him to “processing” (not dissimilar to L. Ron Hubbard’s
Dianetics auditing process), breaking him down and rebuilding him. Freddie becomes a true believer, a
trusted confidant and the unquestioning blunt instrument willing to assault and
intimidate Dodd’s detractors despite Dodd’s wife Peggy’s (Amy Adams) obvious distrust and Dodd’s
own son Val’s (Jesse Plemons) assertions that the Master is making it all up as he goes
along.
Hugely
ambitious, beautifully shot and boasting some impeccable performances, The
Master is a
diaphanous, obvious, slip of a film; there’s a lot of sound and fury but little
real substance. It’s hypnotic,
mesmerising, without ever being involving and with a quasi-religion and title
character obviously based on Scientology and its founder L. Ron Hubbard,
there’s plenty of meat here but nothing you can get your teeth into. What is The Cause? What does it actually believe? There’s tangential mention during
processing sessions of alien invasion and past lives but nothing solid. Nor is their any real exploration of
what drives such a cult; the need to believe, the desire for acceptance, the
relationship between guru and devotee, the cult of personality, all largely go
unexplored as does any suggestion of homoerotic attraction between Dodd and
Freddie. Writer/director Paul
Thomas Anderson draws on incidents from Hubbard’s life and his founding of Scientology
(the boats, Seymour Hoffman’s resemblance to Hubbard, the arrest for practicing
medicine without a licence, his reliance on wealthy patrons, the desert
conference, the school in England, etc.) but pointedly avoids any exposé or
overt criticism of the movement, even going so far as to state publicly: “I didn’t want it to be a biography. It’s
not the L. Ron Hubbard story.” You
can’t really blame him, the man would obviously like to work again in
Hollywood, but it is a shame; the L. Ron Hubbard story is the interesting one
to be told here.
Anderson
prefers instead to concentrate on Joaquin Phoenix’s disturbed, alcoholic
drifter Freddie. It’s a
flamboyant, showy performance of hunched, almost bestial, incoherence from
Phoenix who spends much of the film bent over, clutching his sides like someone
with a particularly nasty urinary tract infection. He’ll probably get an Oscar nomination for it but he
shouldn’t. Far better is Philip
Seymour Hoffman as the blustering, charismatic Dodd; a snakeoil salesman who
may just believe his own hype. As
she is in everything else she does, Amy Adams is easily the best thing in the
film, pitching Dodd’s wife Peggy as somewhere between a Stepford Wife and Lady
Macbeth and there’s strong support from Jesse Plemons, Laura Dern, Kevin J.
O’Connor and Christopher Evan Welch.
Perhaps
the greatest sin of the film is that we never get any real sense of The Cause’s
growth or the impact the Master has on his followers. There are some fantastic moments, Dodd’s initial processing
of Freddie, the society dinner party confrontation between Dodd and Christopher
Evan Welch’s sceptic, but ultimately, as much as it may at times enthrall, The
Master is
just too ponderous, too ambiguous to satisfy. Too little happens, there’s just too much time devoted to
Joaquin Phoenix’s asshole-drunk act.
It’s thought-provoking but only in the sense that you’d think with such
rich material Anderson might have constructed the truly epic film The Master so obviously wants to be and
which the critics have already anointed it as.
Perhaps
the last word however should go to legendary curmudgeon Harlan Ellison who claimed in a 1978
interview: “Scientology
is bullshit! Man, I was there the
night L. Ron Hubbard invented it, for Christ's sakes! We were sitting around one night...who else was there? Alfred Bester and Cyril Kornbluth and
Lester Del Rey. And Ron Hubbard,
who was making a penny a word and had been for years. And he said: “This bullshit's got to stop!” He says: “I gotta get money.” He says: “I want to get rich.” And
somebody said: “Why don't you invent a new religion? They're always big.” We were clowning! You know: “Become Elmer Gantry!
You'll make a fortune!” He says: “I'm going to do it.””
Right
there is the germ of a better film than The Master.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Genre:
Drama
Language:
English
Runtime:
2 hours 24
minutes
Certificate:
15
Rating:
UK
Release Date:
Friday
2nd November
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