"The opening quote of Tom Brokaw's oft-read The Greatest Generation is by FDR: ‘This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.’ The epochs of The Great Depression and WWII led to a deep anti-intellectual conformism, which only cracked during the horrendous foreign policy adventures in Indochina in the late 1960s. What was told, which most of us know to be false, is that the branding of stoic masculinity breeding, and hard work to achieve our own pocket-sized utopias was within arm's length; if we can destroy the Nazis and neuter the Soviets, anything is possible. And unfortunately, in popular culture, this was reinforced, with some exceptions (Ray's Bigger Than Life a clear standout).
“The Master, then, feels like a lost narrative, but one of such familiarity that most who came of age even generations after the so-called ‘Greatest’ will experience déjà vu. This post-WWII world is hyper-sexualized, moralistic but with arguments held together by scotch tape and intoxicated on cheap cult theories, politics and booze. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, in his best performance) slips through the cracks during the Eisenhower years: he can barely contain his nervous rage, constantly running from the jobs he's holding and eventually finding himself in the palm of a contrarian crackpot's hand, Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). It is here that the film's greatest mystery lies: what does Quell find in Dodd, and vice versa, that binds them so tightly? Why is Quell at the mercy of a pseudo-science patriarch and Dodd with such an elusive, anti-authoritarian, feral creature? Wouldn't narrative traditions suggest that there ought to be some kind of compliment here?
“Except that this is a film built on anti-compliments. How else to explain the unusual use of 70mm? The visual palate of the most generous and expansive of formats here is not of long panoramic vistas, but of medium shots and close ups, many times of faces, and often times using an extremely shallow depth of field, smudging foreground action into out of focus, shadowy blotches of color. Jonny Greenwood's score is also in this vein; its cues are, except in a few occasions, placed in transition scenes, unlike the operatic sonic blasts of his work in There Will Be Blood. But mostly, this is, like his masterpiece Punch-Drunk Love, director Paul Thomas Anderson taking an opportunity to complicate genres and filmmaking eras evoked by pitting anti-heroes (Adam Sandler in the Lewis/Tati tradition, Phoenix in the Phil Karlson/Nic Ray tradition) into an revisionist narrative.
“Back to déjà vu, though: The Master is something entirely singular in Anderson's body of work, closer to the revisionist historical cinema of Full Metal Jacket, Zodiac, Doomed Love and The House of Mirth. Which is to say: these histories are able to be experienced as a consciousness. With WWII, drifters are societal anomalies, bellwethers of a failure to suppress something else other than what was acceptable. There's a reason why these films stand out, which may say a lot about the times we live in and the years in which each of the films mentioned were made than the times depicted on screen. The Master, set during a period of ‘forward-thinking’ capitalism, finds its elliptical narrative footing in the self-doubting head of a broken, rugged failure, whose primal, sexual impulses supersede any kind of professional or ideological adult conformism that our culture digests as pamphleteered self-fulfillment." ~ Michael Lieberman (originally posted February 23, 2013)
Note: The Master ranked #3 in the 2012 Muriel Awards.
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