Nature or nurture—which is our master? We now know the answer to be “both,” but that does not solve the mysteries of origin, and why the people and ideas we encounter resonate in the idiosyncratic ways that they do for each individual.
Without explicitly invoking either “N” word, with The Master Paul Thomas Anderson powerfully fashions a case study by allowing us to glimpse—and sometimes to stare at, very intimately—the bond between a traumatized WWII veteran and a charismatic group leader practicing a sort of transcendental psychology that may be no more than the product of a prolific imagination.
We meet Freddie Quell (played by Joaquin Phoenix) as he convalesces on a Pacific island while the war winds to a close. People back home will not understand the effects of the trauma they have suffered, a navy psychologist tells a roomful of Freddie and his comrades in combat shock (a warlike form what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder). And then they are shipped Stateside, where Freddie tries to assemble a peacetime life from the pieces of his fractured psyche.
Somehow Freddie finds himself at sea, on the ship of one Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher,” he tells Freddie when the first meet. “But above all I am a man, a hopelessly inquisitive man. Just like you.”
That Freddie is far from the inquisitive sort shows us that projection is in play for Dodd (and for Freddie, as we find particularly in a musical scene somewhat reminiscent of Mick Jagger’s “Memo from Tuner” in Performance). But like Dodd, Freddie hungers for self-knowledge, a hunger with which he is unacquainted before he tastes delight in being interviewed by Dodd.
But that Dodd and Freddie are both men, cut from the same primeval cloth—whether or not Dodd’s astral ontology is fact or fiction—is a truth Anderson cleverly highlights by giving the uncannily prepossessed Dodd brief outbursts of baseness, a descent into the animal realm from which he means to elevate Freddie. Chief among these moments is a jail-cell argument between the pair, where for a brief stretch of time to two men come to mirror each other.
Phoenix and Hoffman are magnificent. Phoenix gets the showier part, perhaps putting himself over the top in the Oscar race during the follow-up to the initial interview, a rapid-fire psychoanalytical examination by Dodd that Anderson shoots in a single, uninterrupted shot of Freddie. The psychological movement and intensity that Phoenix lets surface onto his face makes for one of the more riveting and breathtaking static shots you will ever see. And this is merely one of the more overtly brilliant bits of acting in a performance suffused in nuance. Where a lesser actor might at best be able to play only the trouble and stultified aspects of Freddie’s affect, Phoenix is able to personate the vagaries beneath the surface, the malleable soul of the man.
Likewise, Dodd is not just a big, stylish charlatan, deluded or deluding; he is a man striving to understand how and why Homo sapiens—and he himself—is the creature he is. Hoffman perfectly portrays Dodd’s well-intended desperation to believe, in all its paradoxical complexity.
Anderson was never a frenetic filmmaker, and he’s become even less so as he develops, even as his films get more aesthetically exciting. The Master is his most stately work yet, with the director often letting the camera linger and then move languorously while he pulls focus on or brings into frame exactly what he wants to show us. The images are so lush and carefully composed (not only visually, but also aurally) that you can easily be oblivious to the bit of theme or information that’s ever so gently presented.
It may be tempting to write off Dodd as a crackpot cult leader (as most of us do L. Ron Hubbard, on whom Dodd is clearly based), just as one might have dismissed Freddie as an irredeemably damaged wretch had we encountered him in life. But each man has depths, depths through which sounds a resonance each feels echoing in the other. And whatever we might think of Dodd’s methodology, by film’s end Freddie—and Dodd, too—have been altered, touched by the encounter, both having gained something in the exchange.
The Master is beautiful and compelling cinema that invites us to question how we have been shaped, and to consider what we might do to reshape our very selves. We may never fully understand the forces that we cannot help but serve, but we can open ourselves to investigations that may lead us with discover tools to use in our acts of self-creation, and in our attempts to connect.
The Master, now playing at the Art Theatre of Long Beach (2025 E. 4th Street, LB 90804). For info on show times call (562) 438-5435 or visit arttheatrelongbeach.com.