It’s not that there is nothing going on in the movie, and we weren’t only bewildered and bored. We were also, intermittently, intrigued, daunted, amused, troubled. The very metaphor of the cause that I have just used is borrowed from the film, where something called the Cause (and distinctly resembling Scientology) is one of its elusive subjects. The questions it asks, again and again (in a way it doesn’t do anything else), are whether charisma can be portrayed and/or inspected and whether a charismatic leader can help anyone who seriously needs help.
The answers seem to be yes, no and no. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of the Master is remarkable because it makes charisma seem so unsteady and so complicated. He is lordly, mischievous, scoundrelly, conniving, bullying, petulant, perfectly in control, half out of control, always slithering from the posture of the sage into that of the snake-oil salesman. But then this brilliant picture is not an inspection or exploration of the person or the type, it’s a fascinated trailing after him. When he abruptly loses his temper two-thirds of the way through the film, thoroughly shocking one of his devoted rich acolytes played by Laura Dern, it’s the same temper and the same loss we have seen twice already. We’re not shocked, this is not a revelation to us as it is to Dern. The repetition has its eerie force, though. We have long realised that the Master is his own permanent self-invention, and we finally see that there is no limit to the vast contentment with which he can keep putting together the self he so enjoys and admires. Nothing unsettles him for long: defections, hostile questions, doubt, imprisonment, all small bumps in the long right road. At the end of the film, still smiling with an air of benevolence that would scare the life out of anyone not seeking to grovel, he says: ‘Everyone needs a master.’ He doesn’t mean he needs one. He means everyone needs him, and if they imagine they don’t they are doomed.
The Master’s counterpart, disciple and victim is Freddie Quell, played by Joaquin Phoenix with a lurid tormented charm which spreads all over the large bright screen and makes you long for the days of lower definition and poorer visibility. He hunches his shoulders, twists his mouth, often talks unintelligibly, as if knowing what he is actually saying were a privilege he jealously wants to keep to himself. We first see him in the navy at the end of World War Two, frustrated, lonely, willing to fall in a frenzy on a woman made of sand as long as she has breasts that stick up sharply enough. The memory of this effigy recurs throughout the movie, and at the end, having found and lost and found the Master again, Freddie picks up a girl who has the right sort of breasts and is much more relaxed and amusing than any piece of Pacific beach could be. Perhaps he’s cured.
But cured of what? After the war, identified as a potential misfit in any arrangement where fitting might be required, Freddie becomes a photographer in a department store, cuts cabbages in a California field, and runs away to sea when the liquor he has become an expert at mixing – from paint thinner and various engine fuels – almost kills a man. The boat he hops onto belongs to, or is rented by, the Master, named Lancaster Dodd, who also has a taste for paint thinner. And so begins the weird relationship that so statically dominates the rest of the movie.
by Michael Wood, LRB | Read more:
Image: via Chicagoist
