The Master’s voice on war and weariness
Paul Thomas Anderson just hit the wall. His eyelids are starting to droop over his steely blue eyes, and the fiveo’clock shadow looks like a dark muzzle, slowly suffocating the man who just walked away from the Venice film festival with the majority of the hardware for his latest film, The Master.
“At this point, nothing but a nap will do,” says Anderson, who’s been holed up in a Park Hyatt hotel room for the past two hours. One of the swarming handlers looks up momentarily from her BlackBerry to offer the American auteur a cup of coffee, which he waves off with an air of fatigued frustration.
“No point in throwing good caffeine after bad.”
At this point Anderson acknowledges the next inquisitor with an apology. “I’m so sorry. I’m a little bit spacey.”
Within seconds, a few of the questions scrawled across my legal pad have already been answered, namely, why cast Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Freddie Quell — the fragmenting personality at the very heart of the bizarre post-Second World War period piece?
Just looking at Anderson at this moment of rawness reveals an abstract, but undeniable, connection between the man who explored the depths of America’s oil-based economy in There Will Be Blood and the wacky actor who blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction in the self-indulgent ode to addiction and celebrity in his last festival outing, I’m Still Here.
It’s the borderline manic expression bleeding through their eyeballs; Phoenix could be the funhouse reflection of Anderson, the uncontrollable demon lurking inside an otherwise contained family man.
Anderson can’t articulate it any better. In fact, he’s having a hard time articulating anything at all. “I always wanted to work with Joaquin, blah, blah, blah …” he says, looking so bored it’s heartbreaking.
So, then, what’s the point of this thoroughly sketchy character who returns home from the war in the Pacific with a terrifying alcohol addiction and a weak sense of a moral compass?
Is Freddie Quell the embodiment of the universal soldier abandoned and forgotten after his years of service by the society he put himself in harm’s way to protect? Is he Fred E.qual – the Everyman so desperate for a sense of purpose that he becomes involved in a new religious movement called The Cause, led by a charismatic — and equally alcoholic — leader played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. And if so, why is he so menacing?
“He’s not menacing,” says An- derson, smiling. “He’s just kind of unpredictable. He’s sweet, Freddie. He’s really sweet. He just picks at Master’s fur, and I like that. He kind of picks at Master’s coat jacket.”
Indeed, over the course of the whole, grand, 70mm spectacle, the viewer watches an almost romantic dance between Freddie and Hoffman’s “Master” – an L. Ron Hubbard-styled character named Lancaster Dodd.
The constant drifter finds an anchor in the portly form of Dodd, but the relationship never really finds any form of satisfactory consummation or catharsis. And that lack of genuine connection is probably the whole point of Anderson’s epic.
Again, not that he can articulate it: “You really only discover what you’ve made after the fact,” he says. “You know, the gravity of the story is pretty mysterious when you’re working on it. It’s like trying to explain why I fell in love with my wife. I can say she’s pretty, she has a great sense of humour and brown eyes — but why do I love her? ... It’s not a question I can really answer.”
Yet, as Anderson starts to let himself ramble just a little, he talks about his own family and growing up with a father who came back from the Second World War somewhat altered.
“I guess there’s a romantic thing there,” says Anderson. “Maybe I wanted to figure out what happened in his life and what life was life for him. It’s a never-endingly interesting homework assignment,” says the kid who grew up in the heart of Los Angeles.
Ernie Anderson was a celebrity in his own right after returning Stateside, landing a job as the Voice of ABC and later, collaborating with comedian Tim Conway on the regular movie broadcast called Ernie’s Place.
“I think I’ve tried to make sense of my father,” says Anderson. “He would always go off by himself. I mean, he was around all the time, but he was kind of quiet in a weird way. For a big personality he was actually a quiet guy. And he never talked about the war.
“Maybe this movie is my way of trying to make sense of what it must have been like for him: To go through bad s--t, you know, and have to move on.”
Anderson says the parallels to what’s happening today are obvious. “Just open the newspaper and you see someone coming back from Afghanistan a complete wreck. And I wonder if there’s ever going to be a moment when I don’t have to read these stories anymore. You know?”
Anderson’s film probably would have won the Golden Lion at Venice for best picture if the rules had allowed.
But the jury awarded Phoenix and Hoffman a dual win for best acting. Anderson won the best directing prize, and Venice rules state one film can’t win everything.
“I love my job,” he says. “I have a great family. And that’s what I keep in front of me.
“I don’t really have a predilection for dismantling things, or self-destruction.
“But sitting in a hotel room talking about yourself all day is a pretty disorienting experience. I’m really on my last legs.”
The Master opened wide on September 21.