Stanley Kubrick had a particular way of directing his actors that
involved repetition. He was meticulous — and also a manic perfectionist — to
such a degree that it bordered an obsessive-compulsive state, but he was also
aiming for greater truth in his films. By having his subjects repeat their
lines 30, 40 or 84 times, he could watch as the actors deconstructed their own
work in front of him.
I mention this because I thought a lot about Stanley Kubrick
during Paul Thomas Anderson’s intellectually obtuse new film of eccentric
dreamers, The Master, about a new-age
cult leader who invokes a Kubrickian style of leadership that borders on insanity.
The cult leader is played by frequent Anderson collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman,
here as a pink-faced snake-oil salesman named simply “the Master.” Master runs
a quasi-scientific cult that believes in trillions of years of reincarnation,
alien humanoids from other worlds and in bizarre social experiments that serve
as Master’s sacred sacrament. One of them requires all the women dance naked
around the living room as he sings songs.
Another Master experiment is called processing, which is a
rapid-fire question-and-answer session with some bizarre requests (“no blinking
or we start over”) and some even more bizarre questions (“do you believe in
incest?”). The first processing subject we see is a persuasive worm of a man
named Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix). Master asks his name so many times — a
deconstruction not far removed from The Shining — that Freddie starts to
doubt his own existence.
The movie begins with Freddie, a Navy man with some psychological
issues so severe that it’s a wonder he wasn’t committed even within the film’s
1950s setting. During some shore leave, some sailors build a sand castle of a
woman, which Freddie then rapes. During a medical evaluation he’s shown the
inkblot cards and, to him, they all look like reproductive organs. At one point
he passes out high atop the mast of the ship, oblivious to a boat full of
sailors hollering at him from below. He’s so far removed from society’s norms
that he can barely muster your pity, let alone empathy.
His biggest problem, though, and possibly the reason for much of
his uncontrollable personality, is his drinking. Remember in Airplane! when Robert Hays said he had a
drinking problem and then he poured his drink down his shirt missing his mouth
entirely? Freddie has a drinking problem that one-ups that: he drinks
everything he comes in contact with. Give him gasoline, bleach and lemonade and
he’ll mix you a cocktail. Lysol, paint thinner and window cleaner, that’s a
party drink. After he leaves the military, we see Freddie working as a
photographer at a department store. In the darkroom he mixes the stop bath,
fixer and other photographic chemicals into a festive nightcap.
The toxicity of his deadly drinks must evaporate from his pores
and hang around him like a cloud because he looks and sounds downright insane.
And that’s when he’s discovered by Master, who is smitten by Freddie’s callousness
toward life and the stupor that weeps from his face. I’m not sure if Master
sees an opportunity or challenge with Freddie, or if he’s envious of Freddie’s
freedom to do anything he wants, and drink anything he can slosh into a flask.
The movie is ambiguous (which might be the understatement of the year).
The film is marvelously shot, with many single shots and scenes
that look staggering in their beauty and production, but the ideas they are
filled with feel hollow and pointless. Anderson is a skilled director — Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, Boogie
Nights, Magnolia … all
terrifically ambitious projects — though he seems to wander here in The Master. If the point was to shows us
the absurdity of cults, and how they infect the weak minded with oversized lies,
then it could have been done with more purpose and perhaps a narrative. Much of
the film is episodes: Freddie acting crazy, Master making demands, Freddie
driving a motorcycle, Master writing his new book. The characters are
engrossing, the horrible wretches they all are, but the story has no hook.
That’s a shame because these are fascinating performances. You’d
have a difficult time finding a performance as startling, frightening or
original as Phoenix ’s
Freddie Quell. He’s a disgusting human being, but I couldn’t take my eyes off
him for a single second in fear I would miss one of his sneering, mangled
smiles as they twisted out of his sour face. I kept forgetting that
Joaquin Phoenix was in there. Hoffman is just as good as the bloated ego of his
cult’s master plan. You can see the charisma oozing from his dialogue, and also
the deception.
Many people are calling The
Master Anderson ’s
“Scientology movie.” There are many similarities: Master could be a stand-in
for Dianetics author L. Ron Hubbard,
the movie has “processing” while Scientology uses “auditing,” the two share
broad ideas about billions of years of meta-physical reincarnation, and both
suffer from persecution from outsiders. If I were a Scientologist I would not
be flattered by what takes place in The
Master, but maybe it’s not even about Scientology. Anderson doesn’t make it clear in the film
one way or the other.
What he does make clear is that there is no rationality when
religious fervor takes over every aspect of a person’s life. He repeats this
theme — Kubrick style: again and again and again — through the entire film.
It’s a fascinating, if also long and occasionally stale, journey, one that I
can only recommend for fans of Paul Thomas Anderson. Everyone else might want
to avoid this dense movie with the ambiguous philosophy. Or wait until it’s a cult hit.
