Review: The Master

“Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality.” Alfred Hitchcock’s own quote about Psycho is more than adequate for any analysis of why we watch Paul Thomas Anderson; it is the marquee of his mastery. A master of scene development, Anderson presses us to hold attention for not a glimpse but an inward journey. Quite the competition of the Andersons this year for Best Picture, the arguments will stem from a preference for construing a story: while Wes Anderson shows us a beautiful picture in totality, Paul Thomas Anderson shows us a focused subject that engages our commitment as if there was a person to converse with us. 

The story revolves around the relationship that forms between the characters of Freddie (Phoenix) and Lancaster (Hoffman). Far from being an extensively detailed waltz between two competing auteurs as the trailer almost led us to believe, the story is a crafted cruise, churning the dark and clear waters we think are so easily separated, of how two men trying to walk a road that frightens them to their core can so very often find each other, and what happens when they come to see each other as long-lost “friends”, even if neither truly believe anyone can ever be a friend. 

The clash is of human endurance, not goals. We do not see a careful craftsman or a droll drone in either of these men. Scenes of a seemingly brilliant and boisterous man losing his temper over semantics is not the portrayal of anyone we are being told to think of as malicious or malevolent, or even manipulative. Scenes of resistance and resilience in the face of simple temptation with little consequence for the taste will not provoke a sense of patsy or sycophant. 

The two instead are good soldiers, staunch and stalwart, holding their post against all odds with general conviction as to how they have arrived. The signals they send out are not for aid but as a signal, a flare, to remind that they are still here. Whether we “side” with either of them is inconsequential. They are usually too far out of reach, we being one of the messages that did not make it through the enemy barrage. However, in them we see those forces of containment we so often see in ourselves, and we see how these two are dealing with it, respective of who they are as people.

In long holds or slow tracking shots with very little camera motion and drawn pans into the occasional close-up or intimate conversation we are not invited to take what we want from the scene, but to see what is there. Only twice does the camera give a perspective shot, and the scenes are so stark and stripped we immediately recognize the unreliability; even if we could touch these two, feel them in us, we would be at loss for which way to begin looking, wanderers we be, not travelers. What we take has little to do with how we respond to the characters, but how we respond to our notion of who they are and why they are acting as they do, as we would someone we know. They do not do “good” or “bad”. They do “them”.  How we react to that and comprehend that says as much about the structure as it does about sensibilities. 

We are meant to fall asleep next to the sand figure, someone to hold, but just as easily slipping through our fingers. As sand itself never forms much of a solid foundation, in a lifetime when all we seek is to become something else, we are constantly escaping our own grasp; others are even more ethereal. The warmth in this movie is for those who seem to be what the resilience will push away, not for those close to us, proximity or “personally”. We repeat over and over a process that does little to show anything other than our own need to understand ourselves through someone else and somewhere else. Whether we try to explain our dream or ignore it or rage against it, we are all too often found in the same cells, right next to each other, far more often shouting for everyone else to shut up, no matter how comforting or close they could be.

A film certainly of ironic and enterprising imagery, Anderson concludes the true “film season” with a Man vs. Man vs. Fate vs. Society story, pitting us not on any side but rather wondering as per what side we are on, and whether we believe in our own explanations enough to think that if we are not helping, we are failing. Perhaps we might even wonder what exactly we might measure as failure.

DA DA DA DA DUM DE DUM DUM DUM! BA WHOOP!
Production of Ebert's Equivalent (c) 2012 :-)