Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is an easy movie to
like, or so I found it anyway. It stands in the great tradition of
the American picaresque, going back at least to Huckleberry
Finn, but with an Elmer Gantry cast. And, like Elmer
Gantry, its larger-than-life hero is presented as a self-aware
con-man. This is one Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), said
to be loosely based on the real-life L. Ron Hubbard, founder of
Scientology. The movie is also set in what were Scientology’s early
years, the 1950s, and the period — as the original season of
Mad Men showed — could have made a statement all its own.
Mr. Anderson chooses not to use it in this way, to create a pointed
historical contrast with the present, although he might have done
so. In fact, he has surprisingly little to say about the America
either of the 1950s or of today. Dodd is presented as sui
generis and not obviously a creature of the land where
religious entrepreneurs and patent psychotherapies have so often
come to thrive.
Moreover, although his portrait of Dodd is a brilliant one, Mr.
Anderson is really more interested in one of his dupes. This is
Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a no-longer able seaman mustered
out of the U.S. Navy at the end of the Second World War with some
kind of unspecified post-traumatic stress. More likely, Freddie’s
only real affliction is being Freddie — which involves an overly
powerful appetite for sex and strong liquor. Mr. Phoenix plays
Freddie with a Popeye-the-sailor grimace and snarl that must be a
deliberate allusion to that pop-cultural hero of yesteryear. But
this is a Popeye stripped of his sometime uxoriousness and with a
taste for home-made hooch instead of spinach. His skill, learned in
the navy, at mixing up heavy-duty spirits out of paint thinner and
developing fluid is what brings him to the attention of Mr.
Hoffman’s “Master,” though it is not necessarily what sustains him
there.
As someone with a predisposition to see things in historical
terms, I regret that The Master doesn’t have more to say
about America’s past, but I think it does reflect an interest in
America’s view of the past — which, paradoxically, may itself
transcend to some extent the vicissitudes of history. Like the late
Ron (Have You Lived Before This Life?) Hubbard, Lancaster
Dodd is fascinated by the idea of reincarnation and makes it the
centerpiece of his so-called church’s commercial appeal. When
accused at one point of practicing hypnosis on his followers, he
replies that, on the contrary, they come to him hypnotized and he
wakes them up — that is, he claims to enable them to recall the
past lives which the self-protective drowsiness of ordinary life
has hidden from them, and to soothe and correct there the psychic
traumas troubling their present lives that only his methods can
detect.
That people are as ready as they are to believe anything so
preposterous may have something to do with a peculiarly American
form of historical anxiety which can only come to terms with the
past by inserting ourselves into it, in one way or another, and to
refashion the strangeness of our ancestors by remaking them in our
own image. Dodd’s promises to those seeking to extend their
historical memories by psychological manipulation are
extraordinarily crude. At their last meeting, he tells Freddie
that, in their previous life together, the two of them ran the
pigeon post of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war. By this time,
however, Freddie is able to regard such a bizarre claim with a
fitting skepticism. Dodd’s way is so transparently fake and
designed from commercial motives to appeal to his followers’
narcissism that even a lunkhead like Freddie must eventually see
through it
Yet it is also clear that in his lapse from belief he has lost
something real. The relationship between the two men, for so long
as it lasts, enlarges and redeems both of them to some extent and
constitutes the main substantive interest of the movie — together
with the relationship of both to Peggy (Amy Adams), Dodd’s young
wife. The latest Mrs. Dodd may be the cult’s only true believer,
not excepting its founder, and so drains off some of the pooling
moral opprobrium that would otherwise be due to him. Unfortunately,
this interesting triangle is immured in Mr. Anderson’s brilliantly
idiosyncratic cinematic technique and the gorgeous imagery of his
director of photography, Mihai Malaimare Jr. It has nowhere to go.
The story, such as it is, is told episodically and through a series
of visually striking images with very little to connect them to
each other. It is easy enough to follow but hardly necessary to do
so, since the narrative arc is so shallow. Mostly what one takes
away from The Master is its imagery, especially those
images which are given a special significance and stand outside
their temporal context.
The most significant of these is that of the sand woman which
Freddie and his fellow sailors in the end-of-war passage at the
beginning of the film sculpt on a deserted beach and to which they
take turns making indecent suggestions that are half mockingly
facetious and half aching with longing. Freddie’s lying alone in
this mute giantess’s embrace comes to stand not only for his sexual
unfulfilment but also for the need to worship an idol, later to
express itself in his relationship with Dodd. When the two part
ways, the latter, in a rare moment of self-revelation, bids a fond
farewell to Freddie by enjoining: “If you figure a way to live
without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us
know.” For a moment, at least, it is impossible not to feel some
sympathy for this crooked, would-be “master” who at heart is as
bereft as his deluded disciples.
Paul Thomas Anderson seems to me to approach not just the
credulity of the Doddites but religious belief itself rather in the
spirit of Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Oxen,” which ends with the
wistful line, “Hoping it might be so.” The emotional power of the
line lies partly in the fact that the hope is not directed at
anything so momentous as the truth of the Christian revelation but
at an obscure folk legend about kneeling cattle on Christmas eve.
Nothing of importance would be proven one way or the other by the
beasts’ kneeling or not kneeling, yet the poet’s hope would be
satisfied by any acknowledgment of its Master on the part
of the universe, even one so humble as a kneeling animal. In the
same way, Mr. Anderson teases us with a share in Freddie’s
desperate hope that even a flim-flam man like Dodd, the humblest of
God’s rational creatures, could be touched by grace. Neither he nor
Freddie nor Dodd himself can quite see it in the end, but the hope
remains.
