There are probably currently a thousand reviews of Paul Thomas Anderson's ‘The Master’ on line, as this is certainly the movie of the moment, and a sure candidate for the Oscars race – I would be very surprised if Joaquin Phoenix does not receive an Academy Award, but at the end it doesn't matter, as he is truly amazing. You may be already tired to hear how superb the film look (it is filmed in 70mm) and how amazingly acted it is, but it is all-true.
The awkward Joaquin Phoenix-Philip Seymour Hoffman relationship, between one man totally sure of himself and another man totally lost, is intriguing and fascinating enough to be glued to the large screen for more than 2 hours. Yes it is about scientology, and it is not… I mean it would be too reductive to make this film only about L. Ron Hubbard’s made-up religion, but the famous Hollywood cult was on my mind all the time, especially because the huge scientology blue church on Sunset Boulevard was not standing very far from the theater where I saw the movie. The no-blinking and no-farting rule during the auditing sessions is pure scientology stuff anyway, just like the past life business, the return for man to a state of perfection and the solutions to all psychological illnesses, and these are not the only references to Dianetics! However, even though the movie has enough material to seriously piss off Tom Cruise, it is never a sort of biopic nor an expose about scientology. Rather, it explores the cult of personality and the darkness and complexity behind human desire, obsession, mind control and delusion.
Before anything else, I had never seen this side of Joaquin Phoenix, he plays Freddie Quell, a tortured and alcoholic man discharged from the US Navy after the war, then a drifter who can’t keep a job, with as much vulnerability as ferocity, and with a constant rictus on his face, maintaining it in a permanent after-stroke-like state. I can’t even describe his out-of-control walk, his incessant and nervous laugh,… when we meet him at the beginning of the movie, we know right away this guy is damaged for life, agonizing between psychiatric disorder and addiction to some super strong alcoholic concoction he brews himself.
Phoenix explodes on the giant screen with a raw violence and a pain hard to watch, he acts like a hurting wild animal that nobody can control,… until he meets the Master, Lancaster Dodd, played by charismatic and debonnaire Philip Seymour Hoffman, the cult leader, who introduces himself with the humble and Hubbard-esque declaration ‘I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all I am a man, a hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.’ Hoffman is also great as the mad man, author of ‘The Cause’, eager of grandeur, and who regards Freddie as a sort of personal project almost too perfect for his improv religion.
Although the characters are larger than the screen, there is room for music, and Jonny Greenwood’s subtle score is used about the same way than his soundtrack was used in ‘There Will Be Blood’; it’s discordant and large-screen, percussive and rhythmic, dramatic and austere at the same time, as it closely follows the human drama unfolding between these two characters. However, the characters are bigger than the music, which stays behind, as part of the background. We are far from ‘Magnolia’ or ‘Boogie Nights’, where the music was loud and center stage or even like another character of the movie.
Despite all this cult talk about human not being animals, despite all this attempt of mind control and emotion suppression, Dodd never tame Quell, who always follows his emotions, stays an out-of-control beast till the end, and even runs free despite his obvious fascination and affection for the cult leader… Quell may have just been looking for a father and he got much more than this in the process. At the end, the movie may be a tale about the struggle between the overwhelming desire to be free and the reassuring desire to be led and help, or about the impossible task to change someone’s true nature and personality. It may be a tale about humans’ long attempt to control the beast inside with the help of religions and other dogma and their immense failure.
Or it may be a tale about the duality of the human mind, with Quell, who communicates with people only violently, hitting men and fucking women, is all amygdala, the non-thinking primitive brain, center of raw emotions, whereas Hoffman, who only relays on intellectual communication with people, is all frontal cortex, control center of emotions, and the delusion that comes with it. But the movie may be about much more than all this.