by Brett Parker
The unspoken truth about the very nature of religion is how gurus and disciples need each other in order for religion to even exist in the first place. A preacher cannot preach if no one is around to believe in his words and a believer can only be a believer if a spiritual cause is arousing enough to inspire self-betterment within themselves. No film probably understands this delicate connection better than Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a rich and hypnotic masterwork that examines the great unease and sneaky affection that develops between a questionable prophet and the troubled drifter who seeks his help. The film is a fictionalized account of L. Ron Hubbard’s early days when he notably pioneered Scientology, but it could essentially be about any religion in the way it shows how spiritual practices assimilate with the human condition and how loopholes can pluck away at any foundation of worship. While the movie gives off an alarming friction as man’s primal urges try to get tamed by enlightened psychobabble, a certain bizarre hope shines through in the end as we realize the backhanded ways we call upon spiritual beliefs to help us get through our lives.
The film opens with a sailor named Freddie Dodd (Joaquin Phoenix) returning home from World War II with deep stares and quirky twitches filled with mysterious pain. Dodd appears to have a few screws loose but is nonetheless thrown back into society anyways to try and be a normal citizen in post-war America. He tries to hold down a job as a photographer at a department store, but he drunkenly brawls with a customer and is sent away. He tries working in a cabbage field, but his hobby of making homemade alcohol out of questionable products leaves one of his fellow workers poisoned, causing him to be chased away furiously from the farm.
One night, Freddie decides to stowaway on a random yacht he finds on his travels, which happens to be under the command of Lancaster Dodd, a writer and spiritual philosopher in the early stages of starting a new religion known as “The Cause.” Dodd discovers Freddie hiding out on the boat, but decides not to throw him off, for he loves the taste of his hooch and senses an unexplainable connection between them. Pretty soon, Dodd subjects Freddie to his own invented form of psychotherapy known as “processing” and is able to sense troubled depths within the broken sailor. It is then that the Guru decides to make this damaged wanderer his ultimate test case and recruits him to help out with his newfound movement.
Pretty soon, Freddie becomes a loyal disciple of The Cause, helping Dodd and his steely wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), as they try to spread their beliefs throughout random parts of the United States. Dodd returns the loyalty by subjecting Freddie to increasingly unorthodox practices meant to help him ease past trauma. Yet as skeptics and obvious questions threaten the logical foundation of the Cause’s ideas while Freddie’s drunkenly erratic and shockingly violent behavior explodes in reoccurring bursts, Freddie begins to question the belief system he’s thrown himself into and wonders if aligning with Dodd is truly the best thing for himself.
As the film allows us a peak at early, midcentury America, the camera slyly recalls the cinematic look and feel of melodramatic Hollywood classics from that era while knocking things slightly off-kilter. The gem-like cinematography by Mihai Malaimare, JR. and the reliably-acute production design by David Crank and Jack Fisk greatly summons the fragile beauty hinted at in the movies of that time which painted lush images of post-WWII America, yet the hostile and confusing behavior of the characters urgently suggests the troubling cracks in such a seemingly clean-cut landscape. Jonny Greenwood once again treats director Paul Thomas Anderson to a transcendent score, (after his towering work on There Will Be Blood) that evokes classical arrangements from the traditional film scores of classical melodramas as if they were filtered through a nightmare to produce sounds of demented unsettlement.
The script’s obvious allusions to L. Ron Hubbard’s early career have led early headlines to believe that the film would be a raw expose of the super-secretive Scientology religion. While the film is not the low-blow whistle blower some obtuse moviegoers expected it to be, one can’t help but notice how it shrewdly conveys the impending mystery of such an organization. Scientology is one of the most widely-debated religious phenomenas of our time. To read up on the subject is to witness a brutal ping-pong match between its detractors and defenders. Those who devote their lives to the cause swear that it’s the most enlightening, eye-opening life-changer thats ever happened to them while others claim it’s one of the most brutal, heartbreaking scams of modern times. The film wisely doesn’t condemn or condone such a religious group, but instead veers between both ends of the spectrum throughout the film. Strangely enough, the film’s in-between-ness on the subject perfectly encapsulates the religion’s aura from a basic, present day view.
In one spellbinding sequence, Dodd subjects Freddie to his intense, half-hypnotic form of questioning known as “processing” that plunges the depths of Freddie’s frantic psyche and causes him to confront painful memories constantly gnawing at him. At the end of the process, Freddie feels a certain sense of release and calm for the first time in the film, and we wonder if maybe Dodd isn’t onto something that could be quite beneficial to damaged human beings. Yet in other scenes, Dodd grows erratic and furious when theories of his Cause are cross-examined with ideological scrutiny, giving off the obvious vibe of a man who is deeply unsure of himself. One curious, prolonged sequence shows Dodd hiding out in an office moments before his latest spiritual manual, The Split Saber, is to be unveiled to his fellow Cause members for the first time and his face conveys looks of fear and uncertainty. The film is never explicit as to whether Dodd is a complete charltan or just nervously trying to work out ideological kinks within the early stages of his bold creation. Scenes of Freddie benefitting from the Cause’s methods in contrast with scenes of Dodd freaking out over naysayers keep us off-balance as to whether the Cause is beneficial or a complete crock.
The Master once again has Paul Thomas Anderson creating a perplexing and hostile environment where vulnerable outsiders encounter calculating hustlers as they both desperately ponder the uncertainty of the world through their fragile alliances. Their push-pull dances seem to satisfy inner needs of power and weakness until you catch on that they’re ultimately seeking validation in a remarkably unpredictable universe. Like the freak climactic storm of Magnolia or the violent oil accidents in There Will Be Blood, fate can deal out random misfortune in the most unforgiving manner, and this has Anderson’s characters clinging to their personal connections to find a significance they can believe in.
The Master is Anderson’s best play on this reoccurring connection yet, not just because the religious angle causes one to ponder this theme to the largest of extents, but also because the meeting between outsider and hustler here is at once the most complex and most tender its ever been in Anderson’s canon. Freddie and Dodd have a burning need for each other that’s stronger than any connection between any Anderson relationship before, for if they’re dance of spiritual enlightenment proves to be a successful one, then they could justify each other’s existence in ways that no other entity on the planet could come close to doing. The guru will have healed a disciple with his beliefs and the disciple would have found guidance of actual worth and so forth. Yet this alliance between the two men turns out to be anything but solid as both Freddie and Dodd represent the duality of man as both an animal and a spiritual being, respectively. Anderson brilliantly suggests the great difficulty and friskiness that arises when both ends of this spectrum try to meet in the middle in spite of their gentle willingness. Freddie’s primal id may be too deep-rooted and elusive to tame while Dodd may be too cocky and narrow-minded to provide a foolproof base of religious guidance.
Phoenix and Hoffman both turn in astoundingly compelling performances that sets off Anderson’s primary forces like firecrackers. Phoenix especially swings for the fences and turns in a fearless display for the history books. It’s one of those rare depictions of cracked madness where the performer goes to such scary heights to get their result that it’s both exciting and disturbing at the same time. There’s something to be said for Phoenix’s strangely unique gifts in how he makes Freddie’s ferocious confusion sympathetic. As the super-charismatic and curiously testy spiritual leader, Hoffman skillfully delivers an Orson Welles-like grandeur to the role that carefully veers between charming and volcanic. The vibrant and affectionate connection between these opposite extreme performances sustains the movie throughout and damn near ignites the screen in a jailhouse scene where both characters release unhinged fury on each other (as Phoenix holds us in his visceral grip by thrashing his body around his jail cell). It all eventually boils down to a sneakily heart-wrenching scene where Freddie and Dodd confront each other and ponder if they could truly satisfy their needs through each other’s souls. The surprisingly touching part as how much they achingly wish that could happen.
Like Officer Kurring in Magnolia and Barry in Punch-Drunk Love, Freddie is able to discover his own justified closure amidst the increasingly-chaotic world around him. For all the trouble and confusion that the Cause wrought, Freddie is able to confront his own-problems with a hint of level-headedness. The last scene shows Freddie half-jokingly trying out “processing” on a random bar pickup, and we don’t feel his silliness is meant to be spiteful but has given him a slight new way to be comfortable around people. And perhaps that’s what The Master has been getting at all along: that in order to get through this messy ordeal known as life, sampling outside beliefs and filtering it through your own terms may just be the way to go. For when Dodd tells Freddie, “if you figure out a way to live without a master, any master, be sure to let the rest of us know, for you would be the first in the history of the world,” what he may or may not realize is that striving to live without a master may be the most helpful method of all.
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