Raging id meets controlling ego
We sense it coming, but it’s explosive nonetheless when two distinct minds finally howl in unison in Paul Thomas Anderson’s transfixing The Master.
It comes when Joaquin Phoenix’s unmoored sailor Freddie Quell and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s smug shaman Lancaster Dodd are placed in adjoining jail cells.
Quell trashes his cell while Dodd counsels reason, until the two suddenly turn on each other, screaming as one. Raging id has broken through to controlling ego, raising the stakes of this rich Freudian mind game.
You may read elsewhere that there’s scant narrative to Anderson’s sixth feature, leastways nothing as compelling as in such earlier films as There Will be Blood or Boogie Nights. This is emphatically not the case, although the throughline is subtle and a second viewing certainly assists. This is one of the year’s best films; it’s worth any effort needed to fully appreciate it.
You can follow the stories of Anderson’s vividly sketched characters simply by staring into their eyes, one reason to be thankful for the writer/director’s decision to film with the visual pop afforded by 70mm celluloid.
Quell makes his unsteady entrance in the South Pacific of a waning World War II, where his dead, unfocused orbs stare at an uncertain future. He disgusts his fellow sailors with his masturbatory beach antics. But he wins back their favour with his knack for powerful homemade hooch.
Dodd’s gaze is considerably more alert when it first falls upon Quell, the beginning of a mutual fascination. The combative Quell has been discovered as a stowaway aboard Dodd’s magisterial yacht, which is heading from San Francisco to New York.
“You’ve wandered from the prop- er path, haven’t you?” says Dodd, who calls himself “a hopelessly inquisitive man” yet whose minions address him as The Master (and also Commander). He’s the author and chief proponent of a quasi-religion called “The Cause” (read: Scientology) wherein the mind is used to control personal actions, to heal bodies and to travel through time.
Dodd accuses Quell of fouling himself with alcohol. Yet the shaman quickly becomes enamoured of the sailor’s vile hooch, the first of many steps each man will make in a dance requiring no female embrace.
Perhaps Dodd reads Quell’s misshapen features and hunched physique as one might a Picasso painting, the angular and insisting opposite of his own roundness and rectitude.
To employ the animal and cartoon references Anderson favours, Quell is the Tasmanian Devil to Dodd’s Foghorn Leghorn, two Looney Tunes characters created by Robert McKimson, whom I’ll bet Anderson admires.
Speaking of crazy tunes, keep your ears alert not just for the discordant urgency of Jonny Greenwood’s score, but also for the period-specific torch ballads by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Helen Forrest and Jo Stafford, which add notes both poignant and mocking, attesting to the film’s impressive fluidity and detail. Likely Oscar nominees both, Phoenix and Hoffman command the giant screen so completely it’s hard to imagine anyone pulling it away from them. Amy Adams manages this feat as Dodd’s wife, no servant to The Master, who adds a third set of eyes that often unnervingly seem to be peering directly into the viewer’s own, demanding a response. The structure of The Master may hold its greatest intrigue: Anderson’s emphasis on repetition, and on demands that are occasionally sung or shouted, suggest he wants the viewer to actually experience what “the process” of indoctrination is all about. The film isn’t an assault on Scientology, or any other set of beliefs. Instead it directs our eyes, ears and minds to the slow drip and dissolve of personality, showing how the path from silly animal to deluded human is shorter and straighter than we think. I’m reminded of the closing lines of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which invites a similar gloomy analysis: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”