Some Are Born Great...

Review: The Master

"Say your name." 
"Freddie Quell." 
"Say it again."
"Freddie Quell." 
"Might as well say it one more time, just to make sure you know who you are."

There's no turning back once Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) sits for informal processing with Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The two men face each other over a tape recorder, Dodd leveling softballs ("Say your name.") followed by more searching questions ("Are you thoughtless in your remarks?"). He speaks with an amiable pomposity, as if giving a Sunday morning sermon. The processing scene is pivotal to The Master, and it's fun to watch: a mental tennis match between Hoffman's confident prodding and Phoenix's unpredictability.

From their meeting, Dodd senses something in Freddie: an otherness? Or that the boy is so easily malleable?  To say he's more instinct than intellect is an understatement. He's a drained vessel, far from heroic, lacking in social conduct. We laugh at his base stupidity: he humps, then curls up to, a sand mermaid made by sailors on the beach. And Phoenix gives an exhausting, highly external performance, his posture strained, his lip fixed in a sneer. Freddie's such an extreme that I wondered how The Cause could lure ordinary thinking people.

Hoffman is the best he's ever been, as effortlessly authoritative as Orson Welles in his early days. Amy Adams may be the real manipulator as his always watchful wife, or (and I suspect this more) full-on Stockholm, a loyal lapdog that Dodd has indoctrinated. Paul Thomas Anderson, writer and director, has assembled the parts together. Is his carefully calibrated direction like Dodd's rhetoric, fooling us into thinking he's made a great movie? As Adams says, maybe it's no more than "a grim joke."

Freddie doesn't reach any great self-realization. His final scene with Dodd simmers, without the volcanic crucifixion that ends Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Hoffman singing "On a Slow Boat to China" as a goodbye feels deliberately arbitary. The Master reenacts welcome-home war films like The Best Years of Our Lives  (1946) and strips them of their patriotism, their hollow Messages and Meanings. We wait with Freddie to figure out where we're going; and when we arrive, what have we seen?

For Your Consideration: Best Picture; Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson); Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman (Actor); Amy Adams (Supporting Actress); Jonny Greenwood (Score).