You've got to have a certain kind of patience when watching a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. His first major release Boogie Nights clocked in at an overly-long 155 minutes. It's the simple case of a writer getting to direct his own movie and not wanting to cut anything out (see also Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow, James Cameron). His follow up film Magnolia was an exhausting 188 minutes. I could write a whole dissertation on the flaws of that movie. Then, he experimented with trying to tell a story in under two hours and the result was the somewhat unfulfilling Punch-Drunk Love. His last movie There Will Be Blood, while long (158 mins), had purpose in almost every scene. But, in his latest feat, The Master, 137 minutes feels like watching Magnolia twice.
I've got a love/hate relationship with PTA. His movies are long-winded, esoteric, and incredibly egocentric. Yet, they're also beautifully shot, his dialogue is always very crisp, and his big picture plot elements are unrivaled. He just gets too bogged down in his own banal self-indulgence. He takes thirty minutes to show something that could be done in ten. The Master suffers from this the most. A good forty-five minutes go by before anything remotely interesting happens. PTA usually starts off pretty slow, but where as There Will Be Blood does it effectively, keeping the viewer interested even though there isn't a single word of dialogue uttered in the first fourteen minutes, The Master fails to keep the attention.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Freddie Quell, a Naval veteran with serious emotional problems trying to adapt to normal life outside of the service. He falls in with Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the "master" of The Cause (essentially Scientology), entranced by his teachings, and finally feels at home. Unable to shake his violent and sexual tendencies he turns to Dodd, who takes Freddie under his wing, for guidance. It's not an overly-complex plot and in most cases wouldn't take another director two and a half hours to tell, but it's PTA's exhaustively slow pace that weighs the movie down making it feel like it will never end.
There are some truly extraordinary moments, though, in the film. These moments usually show up when Phoenix and Hoffman share screen time together. The two are magnificent in their portrayals of Freddie and Master, Phoenix especially who is essentially unrecognizable. Phoenix pours everything into the role. As Freddie, his right eye squints just a little more than his left, he speaks out of the right side of his mouth, his walk is hunched. He's completely transformed himself into the character-- a character you both empathize with and are completely disgusted with. Hoffman is great also playing the restrained Dodd. He's not a religious zealot, pontificating every second of every day trying to rope in any and all members into The Cause. No, he's calm, collective, but with sporadic moments of explosive frustration. It boils down to the fact that he's almost entirely full of shit. He's so convincing, it's hard to figure out if Dodd actually knows he's full of shit or if he actually believes the things he says.
The Master is a hard movie to enjoy, but you'll also find yourself captivated by it. It is by no means Paul Thomas Anderson's finest work, in fact, it's probably his most self-serving. You almost have to sit back and wonder who he's trying to entertain with this film. Like Magnolia, each scene seems as masturbatory as the next. However, there is a higher entertainment value to Magnolia (well, at least the first two and half hours) that seemed to be missing from The Master and was replaced with "art for the sake of being art". If you're looking for PTA at the top of his game, maybe skip this one and watch some Daniel Plainview for the next three hours.
C+
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