Movie review: The Master | canada.com

By Katherine Monk

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We are propelled through the fog of life by myriad mysterious forces, forever in search of some elusive cause.

Paul Thomas Anderson?s The Master attempts to navigate these unknowns in the only way we can: Through the narrative of the personal, the intimate and the physical experience of being.

It?s an inherently murky ? and often frustrating ? exercise, mostly because we often don?t know where we are until we?ve drawn the map of our own lives to see the outline of the larger terrain, where the roads and rivers travelled attain contextual meaning.

The Master churns through these waters with such a precise vision, we may be seduced by the intense clarity of the images ? recorded on pristine 70mm film stock ? but the meaning is by no means any less abstract.

This is one of those films that washes over you like so much water, leaving you drenched with impressions and the sensation of being wet, but without any fixed location of feeling.

Fittingly, the movie opens on a ship.

The first image shows us the chop of the slipstream in turquoise waters. A group of sailors are draped over the rigging of a gunship. This is the end of the war in the Pacific, and once-battle-bound fighters are suddenly adrift in a surreal sea of peace.

They have no purpose, and within moments, the idyllic image of men sleeping on white sand turns menacing as we meet our central character, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a man so hungry for meaning he looks emaciated.

Freddie empties the grain alcohol fuel from the torpedoes then mixes it with coconut milk. He then celebrates his poisonous high by molesting a sand castle shaped like a woman.

It?s a terrifying introduction to one of the creepiest characters to emerge in a leading role since Norman Bates did his shower routine, and Anderson does nothing to soothe our minds about Freddie as he follows this lost, black sheep back stateside.

Emotionally paralyzed and steeped in post-traumatic stress, Freddie finds it difficult to re-enter society. Every Rorschach blob looks like female genitalia, and every chemical in the darkroom proves drinkable to the distraught drifter.

For a brief interlude, he lands a job as a department store photographer ? and this is where Anderson proves his visual talents, and perhaps offers a glimpse of his own creative muse as Freddie tortures his victims in front of the lens.

These frames aren?t just stunning tributes to Anderson?s eye and his ability to assemble a production team capable of period perfection, they shoot straight to the subconscious and our collective sense of memory.

Somehow, these images of postwar youth photographed beneath hot floodlights resonate. They push us to conjure the framed pictures of our own family, collecting dust on some dresser or hanging on the wall of the basement stairs.

They click, and it?s important we?re seeing them through Freddie?s eyes, because from this point on, we?re experiencing the universe from Freddie?s fragmenting point of view.

Anderson sets him up as a voyeur, but in fact, we?re the gawkers, and we get a very good show.

Standing centre-frame is the terrifying and terrified Freddie Quell (Fred E. Qual, a sort of Wile E. Coyote constantly falling off cliffs), as well as his would-be saviour and latter-day Satan, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Together, these two have an almost Roadrunner-style relationship as Freddie chases the elusive ring of human meaning with dogged intensity, while Lancaster seems to offer the tender and juicy cure for Freddie?s spiritual hunger: Lancaster is the self-professed leader of ?The Cause,? a cultlike movement that aims to cure people of existential angst by explaining pain ? all pain ? as the remnant of past lives.

Freddie is seduced by Lancaster?s confidence and his close group of family and friends, but more than anything, Freddie is seduced by the mirror image of himself. Lancaster is another drifting soul with a menacing thirst for the bottle, but where Freddie is an outcast, Lancaster has enough gravitational mass to create his own atmosphere.

Freddie wants to breathe Lancaster?s air, and for the bulk of the running time, he sucks in the freshness like a coal miner hauling on a pipe to the surface. He grows dependent on the oxygen and the light-headed feeling, but every single frame offers a new slice of tension because both men are highly volatile.

One small spark and the whole movie turns into a fireball.

Anderson is so gifted at creating these internal gears and cogs, we?re never fully aware of the ticking time-bomb, but we can sense something is unwinding ? and that something could very well leave a crater.

It all makes for an off-kilter experience because we can never fully embrace any of the characters. Freddie remains a creepy man with curved shoulders and a concave chest, as though someone with a very large boot were standing on his torso. Lancaster, on the other hand, is a very large man with who seems entirely sympathetic ? even prophetic ? until he?s besotted by booze and sex.

The viewer has no stable terrain: We are on Anderson?s rocking ship for the duration, forced to watch the stunning scenery as it floats by like so many palm trees on a Pacific Isle, or so many dead bodies slowly rising from the deep.

A movie that forces full surrender in order to work its magic, The Master is not the kind of movie that panders with easy conclusions and lovable characters. It makes you work for some shred of escapist fantasy, then slowly but surely, rewards the slave in each one of us with a little bone of personal meaning.

Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/09/28/review-the-master-a-cinematic-masterpiece/

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