The Master is a strange love letter to America, or rather the American. The American is characterized by a belief of their individual ingeniousness, resilence, independence, and persistence. Sometimes these beliefs are justified, but usually, the truth turns out to be kind of depressing. The American doesn’t take a hint, no matter how strong. He is kin to the cockroach. And everyone in Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling film is very American.
Freddy Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is a Navy man. We meet him on a beach somewhere in the South Pacific, lounging around, hunchbacked and squinting. The first thing out of his mouth is some gallows humor-laced anecdote about the best way to get rid of crabs; “You got to shave one testicle, then all the crabs go over to the other testicle. You got to light the hair on fire on that one, and when they all go scurrying out, you take an icepick and you fucking stab every single last one of them.” Next thing you know, he is humping a sand sculpture of a mermaid as a “joke”. In the hands of a different sailor, the story and the action would come off easily – a kind of Rat-Pack-y testosterone-overload humor that comes with desperate, war-ridden, gender-isolated times. But Freddy is not that sailor, with him these things are performed too seriously, there’s too much invested. Everything about him is fevered, taut, and most of all incapable of hiding how fucked up he is behind anything more convincing than a barky burst of laughter.
Freddy unabashedly flaunts qualities that others spend their whole lives repressing. “It’s a pussy.” “A cock entering a pussy” – a Rorschach test confirms a seemingly insatiable obsession with the female anatomy, but his more deadly (and easily indulged vice) is alcohol. He’s a man of extraordinary yet simple tastes; his cocktail of choice varies from paint thinner to boat fuel. Where most would gag and retch, Freddy drinks with barely a cringe, relishing the burn. Freddy’s concoctions – obviously and uninterestingly symbolic of an urge to suppress some nasty memories of his childhood, the war, and his myriad past failures – are what bring him physically and spiritually closer to Lancaster Dodd, AKA “Master”.
Lancaster Dodd may not be L. Ron Hubbard, but that is undoubtedly the easiest connection to draw. Philip Seymour Hoffmann is an obvious choice for the outwardly pompous, self-assured therapist-cum-evangelist-cum-con artist. Freddy and Dodd cross paths when our drunken hero stows away on Dodd’s yacht after accidentally poisoning a migrant cabbage picker with one of his potions. Oddly, Dodd shares Freddy’s taste for unusual liquors and a bond is formed. Freddy is first conscripted as a brewer for Dodd, but soon is indoctrinated into “The Cause” – a religion that Dodd and his boatful of family and followers are trying to jump start. Birthed of a mishmash of science, psychology, philosophical blather, and “Master’s” personal indulgences, The Cause is a perfect club for Freddy to join. Kind of like the Armed Forces, they can’t afford NOT to take him. Dodd is fascinated by Freddy’s unapologetic lack of social skills and graces, and for the bulk of the film, we watch as he forces what amounts to a bastardized father-son relationship onto Freddy. Through an intensive course of “Processing” – Dodd’s signature brand of psychotherapy that focuses on uncovering deep, dark past experiences while recognizing and invalidating the power of these memories over individuals through endless repetition – Freddy is brought deep into the fold.
“Master” isn’t particularly interesting on his own. His function is an ability to bring out truths in those around about him. At first it seems his illuminatory powers are significant of some special lucidity within himself, but as the plot progresses it’s revealed that he’s a prophet past his prime, out of ideas and clutching at straws. His direction comes less and less from himself and more from his third wife Peggy (Amy Adams), a stone-cold Svengali hiding behind a wholesome, subservient, eternally pregnant exterior. Dodd’s attachment to Freddy increasingly seems like a petulant last stand against Peggy’s will (and his disappointing offspring). Freddy plays along for a while, enjoying the game-like exercises involved in Processing and admittedly reveling in Dodd’s paternal affection, but as time passes with limited (really lack of) “progress”, Freddy becomes less of a challenge to be faced and more of a failure waiting to be admitted. Sensing this, and disillusioned with Dodd, he impulsively splits the scene, back on the run, a cockroach on the march.
The greatest strength of The Master is it’s willingness to make a total weirdo tweaker fuck-up head-case it’s protagonist. Freddy Quell is not a character we’ve seen in a major American movie before. Joaquin Phoenix takes advantage of his license to wild out. No actor or director in their right mind would assign a character so many gimmicks, the presence of the slump, the squints, the general slurryness, the walk – it should be too much, but this exercise in overkill pays off for Phoenix* and Anderson, making Freddy oddly real and identifiable. We follow Phoenix round the bend of total stupidity and come back to a Twilight Zone-y truth. He’s a character that you want to keep watching, whether he’s doing something strangely relatable like visiting a dusty memory of a hometown or something completely insane like guzzling photo developing chemicals. And best of all, by the end of the film, there is but a barely perceptible change in him. Despite spending the better part of two and a half hours of dredging through the ugliest and most painful bits of his personal history, Freddy’s big, final triumph is that he’s finally actually screwing a real woman instead of a sand mermaid. His personal philosophy (or non-philosophy) has been tested and has won out.
The America presented in The Master is a place where everyone wants to belong to something, either because it’s easier to figure out your place in the world when you can identify what you “are” by name or because it’s easier to belong to any group than none at all. Freddy’s narrative is primarily defined by the latter path. He never is particularly sold on The Cause, it’s just where he is; a group that’s given him means he wouldn’t have on his own. The Cause is ultimately the same as his job picking cabbage, his stint as a department store photographer, or his Navy service. The beautifully photographed landscapes and locations have very few defining characteristics about them. We are told where we are at different points – New York, Philadelphia, California, Arizona – but it’s inconsequential. Even when Freddy returns to his memory-laden hometown of Lynn, Massachusetts there’s no mystique. The houses are uniform, everyone is uniform – even his lost love Doris, who has moved, married, and had a couple kids doesn’t even have her own name anymore. She’s Doris Day now, just like that Doris Day.
But there are plenty of elements of The Master that are not interesting. A lot of the primary plotline about The Cause isn’t as engaging to the viewer as it obviously is to Anderson. Major moments, like when Freddy suddenly rides a motorcycle off into the Arizona sunset can feel a bit forced. The Lancaster Dodd character is given outsized importance in the narrative, seemingly to give Philip Seymour Hoffman an opportunity to do his thing. He does it nicely, as usual, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. There’s an awful lot of energy spent on really nailing down the not-so-inscrutable dynamic between Freddy and Dodd. Outside of Peggy Dodd, there’s nary a female to be found with any dimensionality. As with many of Anderson’s films (Punch Drunk Love being the exception), you could cut out a good half-hour and still have plenty of room to let things breathe. The Master is the rare example of a film where singular elements triumph over the flawed whole to make a successful film. The mere existence of Freddy Quell is enough.
*Unlike his previous effort, the stinking mess that appeared in these pages back in October.
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