The Master (2012)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Freddie, a volatile, heavy-drinking veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, finds some semblance of a family when he stumbles onto the ship of Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic leader of a new "religion" he forms after World War II.
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Paul Thomas Anderson was inspired by John Huston's 1946 documentary "Let There Be Light," a black and white film about WWII veterans undergoing psychiatric treatment and it is included here.
Audio English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround SubtitlesEnglish, Spanish Supplements “Back Beyond” outtakes and additional scenes “Unguided Message” behind-the-scenes featurette Teasers and trailers Let There Be Light (1946) documentary DistributorAnchor Bay Home Entertainment SRP$39.99 Release DateFebruary 26, 2012 VIDEO & AUDIO The Master looks superb on Blu-Ray.
Freddie has come out of the Navy, and the battles of the Pacific theater, "a neuro-psychiatric casualty" - a term from John Huston's postwar documentary Let There Be Light, about the rehabilitation of traumatized returning veterans, that Anderson has borrowed heavily from for his film.
Anderson took many of his cues from John Huston’s 1945 government documentary Let There Be Light, which explored trauma and depression in soldiers after combat.
Time has vindicated Huston's viewpoints: in addition to Let There Be Light serving as one inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, both Let There Be Light and "San Pietro" were selected for the National Film Registry, for their importance to national history and cinema history.
But the movie is less an indictment than a portrait of how the authentic search for family and community — a recurring theme explored by Anderson in Boogie Nights — can become warped, along with character itself, in a spiritual and moral vacuum.
The films of Paul Thomas Anderson concern odd “families,” people who collect around an idea or profession or a bond of necessity — the porn industry (“Boogie Nights”), a driven oil man who adopts a son (“Let There Be Blood”) or a loose collection of characters that suggest a theme (“Magnolia”).
More akin to Anderson’s earlier Boogie Nights than his brilliant There Will Be Blood , while the production values are superb, the story remains flaccid.
If Lancaster’s greed and lust for power unavoidably recalls Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, in some ways a closer counterpart to The Master is the director’s Boogie Nights—another period drama about American outcasts who share a mutual, utopian delusion.
In the past, he’s explored such concerns in what have amounted to prodigious hat tips to the greats of the cinema: Hard Eight was Scorsese in miniature; Boogie Nights and Magnolia were his ensemble Altman nods; There Will Be Blood was nothing less than Citizen Kane transplanted to the oil business.
Hers is the smallest of the three major roles, but she drives the entire thing… not unlike the Julianne Moore character in Boogie Nights, but even more so.
Hoffman's portrayal of a man with iconic aspirations, in love with the sound of his own voice as he drops pearls of wisdom, recalls Ernest Hemingway, or Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane."
While Dodd is clearly modeled on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, The Master is not particularly interesting as a veiled depiction of that much-disputed quasi-religious movement (much as Citizen Kane does not derive its primary powers from its parallels with media baron William Randolph Hearst).
Like “Citizen Kane,” “The Master” invites frame-by-frame analysis.
There are certainly passages of the sort of “Citizen Kane” ambition you expect from Anderson here, not least in the memorable leading performances by Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix and the magnificent wide-screen cinematography of Mihai Malaimare Jr., a new collaborator for Anderson.
Interested in neither satire nor Citizen Kane-esque excoriation of a public figure, the picture seeks instead to present belief systems and seekers of truth as ridiculous before the sharpness of knowledge gained through experience.
On paper, there's a lot that could by said by this scenario - on paper, the film is saying it - it could explore the psychic dislocation of the American male in the years after World War II; it could study the sociology behind the self-help movements that began around that time, partially in response to that same dislocation; it could be a critical but not condemnatory look at the founding of the disproportionately influential cult of Scientology that sort of forms the inspiration for The Cause (The Master is "about" Scientology to roughly the same extent that Citizen Kane is "about" William Randolph Hearst); it could examine the appeal of pseudoscientific philosophy in the middle of what was meant to be the most rational century of human history.
It is an indirect extension of themes from Anderson's There Will Be Blood: a morally corroded man seeking acceptance from a spiritual leader, and symbiotic selfishness under the guise of doing greater good.
And so, with the combination of this and his 2007 film There Will Be Blood , Paul Thomas Anderson has become not just ‘a’ but perhaps the quintessential American filmmaker.
More akin to Anderson’s earlier Boogie Nights than his brilliant There Will Be Blood , while the production values are superb, the story remains flaccid.
If Lancaster’s greed and lust for power unavoidably recalls Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, in some ways a closer counterpart to The Master is the director’s Boogie Nights—another period drama about American outcasts who share a mutual, utopian delusion.
Anderson remains as evidently fascinated by charismatic pitchmen as he was when he made There Will Be Blood , and there are certainly moments of inspired lunacy.
Anderson (“There Will Be Blood”) shot the move on 70mm film, a wide-screen format that evokes the composed grandeur of Kubrick.
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A pivotal scene on a dry lake bed offers vistas — and optical illusions — that recall Lawrence of Arabia.
Maybe he wanted to emulate the ultimate in intimate epics, that being David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia ?
The format, also used in such classics like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” provides an incredible depth of field.
High praise to genius cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. (Youth Without Youth, Tetro and Twixt), whose visual poetry is matched by Jonny Greenwood's haunting, hypnotic score.
(The cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare Jr., was also dp on Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro and visually stunning Youth Without Youth.)
Mihai Milaimare Jr.’s (“Youth Without Youth”) cinematography is gasp-inducing, especially in 70mm, but certainly in whatever form most people will see the film in as well.
The film was shot on 65 mm film by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. ("Youth Without Youth") adding to its cinematic patina.
Most of the movie takes place in 1950, and the allure of the past explains some of the appeal of the film, with its convincing production design (by David Crank and Jack Fisk) and stunning 65-millimeter cinematography (by Mihai Malaimare Jr., known for the recent Coppola films, "Youth Without Youth" and "Tetro").
The cinematography, the purview of Mihai Malaimare Jr., represents the first time 65mm has been used since Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet .
And while the movie (the first to be shot in 70 mm since Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet 16 years ago) is glorious to watch, it brings no coherence or insight to its two main characters: the wastrel Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) or the shaman-showman Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman).
The Master is also the first motion picture since Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet back in 1996 to be shot on 65mm and projected on 70mm.
And yet he shot the film in 70MM, a giant format generally reserved for epics, and hasn’t been used on a narrative feature since Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 adaptation of Hamlet .
This is the first major American theatrical feature film to entirely shoot on 65mm stock since Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet” in 1996.
The first feature production to be shot in 65mm since Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet in 1996, it mixes exquisite period recreation of the post-World War II Eisenhower years with sublime visual grandeur and larger-than-life characters battling each other and themselves physically and metaphysically.
He must be larger than the young woman, yet he appears shrunken, very much like Grant Williams on his date with the carnival woman in that 1950s exposé of vanishing humanity, "The Incredible Shrinking Man.")
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At times Phoenix’s Freddie hearkens back to Montgomery Clift in “From Here to Eternity,” to name another James Jones tale.
Freddie gets drunk on torpedo engine fuel, grinds atop a sand mound shaped like a naked woman on the beach (a From Here to Eternity quote?) and masturbates into the ocean.
The most classically minded of America's young filmmakers, and the most prodigious, Anderson draws on John Huston and Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann's "From Here to Eternity" and George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun."
Then he returns, just as Vincent Gallo did in " The Brown Bunny ," although I doubt this is intended as a homage.