I viewed The Master
on Saturday in an effort to have a nice 'movie-swap' last week; the new film
review went up on Wednesday so why not put up an 'older' film on Sunday? Because Paul Thomas Anderson makes things
difficult, that's why. I absolutely
adore his films. I really do. There
Will Be Blood, Punch Drunk Love
and Boogie Nights are some of my
favorite films. But holy shit can this
man create an unreviewable film.
On to the
(un)review(able)!
So, it is
1950, WWII is pretty much over, and Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is having a
hell of a time fitting in. He’s got
anger issues, some serious PTSD and one hell of a drinking problem. He can’t keep a job, he can’t keep his hand
out of his pants, and all he is actually good at is making drinkable alcohol
out of things that should not be turned into alcohol.
One day he
sneaks onto a small ship looking for work, the next morning he wakes up and
discovers that he’s piqued the interest of the ship’s ‘captain’, Lancaster Dodd
(Philip Seymour Hoffman). Lancaster, you
see, is an all-around genius. Ph. D.,
M.D., nuclear physicist, writer, thinker, poet, philosopher. He’s kind of a big deal.
Oh, did I
forget to mention he’s also the leader of a new ‘religion’ ‘cult’ ‘group of
self-discovery’? Because he is. He also has a wonderful family that fully
believes in him as well as followers throughout the United States and
beyond. They really, truly believe in
what he has to say.
Aaaaaand…that’s
it. Freddie really likes Lancaster and
honestly believes in him, and he truly believes that he can become a better
person by following the ‘Master.’ But
all of this is interspersed with, well, everything else. Even though the story is fairly linear, it
more-or-less only follows Freddie, so we’re constantly jumping from one
location to the next, often missing days or weeks during which we have no idea
what happened aside from what the characters allude to.
The Master isn’t a bad movie. Far from it, it was one of the most painfully
earnest films I’ve ever seen. Amy Adams,
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix all deliver amazing performances,
and even the ‘smaller’ parts are perfectly played by their actors. It’s just that this is an incredibly open
movie, and that makes it difficult to digest.
There isn’t so much an ending as an end, just as there’s no set climax
or even a real beginning. It’s as if
someone simply filmed a year in the life of Freddie, edited it half-assedly and
called it a film.
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