demoncleaner
Posts: 2176
Joined: 3/10/2005
From: Belfast
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Writing this a half hour after a first viewing I'm drawn to say it probably doesn't quite score the full marks with me, which feels even odd for me to say it since I know I haven't seen a film this year with scenes as mesmeric and electrifying that just seemingly proliferate (certainly in the first two thirds) of The Master.
If I have a qualm with the completeness of the package it's ironically embedded in the probability that Mr. Anderson as director-as-story-teller is just too good, too quick for his script which becomes perhaps a bit too hypothetical in the end. What I mean is the film has such a deceptive pace that I wasn't prepared for it to end, it's a longish, substantial film but I didn't see the time go in and it wasn't until Slow Boat to China (when I realised Christ, this is this films drink your milk shake) that I knew I was in the final third, the penultimate scene for all intents and purposes. It was as though the film chose it's final stages to become ponderous when in its every moment from the beginning until this point it was precisely not ponderous, indeed it was like a fucking X-Ray into human behaviour, albeit one wrapped in this beautific visual fugue. In hindsight the ending's probably fine, probably better than fine, we can't really wish for a guignol skittle bludgeon murder to manifest a release or to telegraph an ending, in many ways it's the least contrived Anderson has ever been, a precise antidote to the critical misgivings of TWBB's climax? Perhaps. I'll need to see it again to really feel the truth behind that proposal.
Celebrating the technical for a minute I thought Joaquin Phoenix (a screen presence I've never relished) was phenomenal. The Oscar's his right? I mean it has to be, once again we're watching one of those total character immersal things, and it's thrilling to think this comes from someone no one really considered a masterful character actor. With his most recent brace of films Anderson is cementing a reputation as a film maker whose trademark is committed and uber credible performances. It isn't much of a creative coup to capture the gravity of a Daniel Day Lewis turn, but with The Master he can now point out Joaquin Phoenix and say, "yeah well, I can get it from someone like him too”. Perhaps now we really get the sense that PTA wasn't flukey with his last film.
Hoffman is obviously great as well, but I imagine him to be in more of a comfort zone than his co-star, and imagine him taking a more wry approach to his character, perhaps adhering to the one rule that Dodd himself is constantly acting. I found the three principal characterisations of Freddie, Dodd and Amy Adams' Peggy fascinating. Adams is so understated as to make it appear she's underused until you realise pretty much every scene she is in nails the rather high probability that she is the mindfuck bolster behind The Cause. It's not often you watch a film and get a glimpse of the much vaunted back-story that actors create for themselves alone. Through various choice intimations I got a sense that Dodd was a bit of a swaggering wastrel, a desultory con-man who fell for Peggy's passive insistence that he re-evaluate his life and perhaps his sins. Dodd is a man who probably fell for his own con, believing that there really was something transformative in this self-regard brought on by the expert nagging of a passive/aggressive spouse. What is “exercise” and “training” to The Cause members is really only a form of re-programming through dull repetition and an insistence on suppressing reactions which are humanly instinctive. Add Freddie to this and I think Dodd has an entity who does two things for him. Fundamentally I think Freddie appeals to Dodd's manchild – who is still very much there despite his newly respectable veneer, but Freddie also gratifies a challenge in “The Master” to prove his own chauvinist theory by elevating this animal to human heights. I love the inherent joke in this film which is that it isn't Freddie's intelligence (he doesn't have any intelligence) that makes him a failed cult member, it's his lack of imagination that means he can't quite jibe with the whole scene no matter how much he fervently wants to be a zealot. In this way Freddie is cult proving. Legitimate movements require a communion of intelligence, cults only require imagination from their people.
< Message edited by demoncleaner -- 16/11/2012 11:05:03 PM >
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"I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit."
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