More than a decade from its release, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master remains a superbly acted and deftly shot film, unfortunately hamstrung by a meandering and aloof plot.
The Master follows a disturbed World War II naval veteran, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), as he attempts to reintegrate into an alienating post-war USA. Addicted to his own illicit moonshine and prone to violent outbursts, Quell is first fired from a department store for assault, and then forced to flee menial farmwork after being accused of poisoning a fellow farmhand with his experimentally brewed hooch. Wayward and now fugitive, Quell unwittingly stows away on a lively steamboat belonging to a cult-leader, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Magnetic and ostensibly genial, Dodd (the eponymous “Master”) takes Quell into his care, attempting to ‘fix’ Freddie’s problems by indoctrinating him into his pseudo-medicinal cult, ‘The Cause.’ Despite Dodd’s warped guidance and Quell’s filial devotion, Freddie remains volatile and must ultimately choose between total submission or leaving the cult (and Dodd’s guardianship) forever. After choosing the latter, we leave Quell in an anomalous moment of emotional intimacy with a kindly girl he picks up from a local pub.
Most apparently, the film looks immaculate. No shot is awkwardly framed, none lacks compositional beauty, nor fails to contribute to the thematic substance of the film. In one of the film’s most memorable shots, Quell desperately flees from assailants across frost-draped, desolate farmland. The camera pulls further and further away, shrinking Quell into the unforgiving landscape. The shot is a fulcrum. In Quell, we find a man hopelessly adrift on dry land. Happily held in stasis on the Pacific during the war, Freddie struggles to find his sea legs on the solid ground of peacetime America. Anderson captures well the anxiety and surreality which must have been unleashed upon so many following the unaddressed trauma of the war.
The film is also impressively acted. Phoenix turns in a career-best performance, imbuing an abrasive character with tender humanity. Like all good Phoenix performances, I half wanted to hug Quell, half wanted to smite him with a rolled-up newspaper. Phoenix’s face bulges into every frame, mollified only by the avuncular charm of Hoffman’s Dodd. Their relationship is convincing and seemingly constructive, making the film less about the pernicious inner workings of cults and more about the innate need for human connection, which creates the appeal of cults in the first place. This is perhaps the film’s most radical insight, though it sacrifices some palace intrigue as a result. At the film’s best, it reaches a warm, hypnotic maelstrom, aided by the perfectly brewed moonshine of Jonny Greenwood’s mesmeric score.
However, for all its virtues, the film has one fatal flaw – it’s pretty boring. Aside from the electrifying first 30 minutes, the narrative is little more than a series of disparate vignettes, some with yelling, some with crying, but none capable of reviving the momentum of the first act. As mentioned before, the film fails to utilise the inherent jeopardy of its cult subject matter – what’s the penalty if a member leaves? Does Dodd ever abuse his power? Is anyone investigating them long-term? The Cause’s leader just seems too benign a presence to inject any lasting tension into the frequently flaccid plot. I’m not asking for Subway Surfers in the bottom half of the screen or a shootout every five minutes to keep me entertained – I’m perfectly at home with a ‘slow burn’ – but not one that keeps fizzling out and refuses to build to a satisfying whole, seemingly blind to its own dramatic potential.
By the end, Quell has finally connected to someone. His concluding sexual tryst with a real-life woman is powerfully contrasted to a shot of him lying beside an illusory ‘woman’ built from sand on the beaches of the film’s opening sequence. He jokes with her, she jokes back. The pair seem to have found a fleeting peace with each other. Yet this revelation springs from nowhere? Dodd has done little to address Quell’s flaws, nor rectify his clearly deformed and over-sexualised view of women. This poignant end is instead a frustrating allusion to a more streamlined film which could have been. As it stands, The Master proves a film I may well contemplate for a long time to come, but I doubt I will get the itch to rewatch. This is an issue I feel is endemic to many of Anderson’s (frequently overpraised) offerings. Is it too much to ask for a film to be an entertaining movie, as well as good “cinema”? Until PTA proves he can consistently achieve both at the same time, I will remain a patient sceptic of the cult of Anderson.
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