Like the previous couple of commentators I was blown away by the quality of the performances in this, P.T. Anderson's follow up to the stellar "There Will Be Blood", particularly from Joaquin Phoenix who completely transforms himself and vanishes into the part - you can practically smell his performance it is so pungent and desperate. Hoffman and Adams are also as great, as expected. Special mention must also go to the exceptional art direction, costuming and cinematography - every thing is perfectly in its place to evoke a genuine sense of early 1950s America. The only problem for me was the wandering, circular nature of the plot and the sometimes oblique narrative. It's engrossing, but so determined to alienate, ends up being confusing. There are stunning scenes - Freddie's first "processing" by Lancaster on the boat was so good I barely remembered to breathe for five minutes. I'm looking forward to watching it again.
I think the Malickesque style/format of filmmaking is the purest vessel through which to not tell a story, but to let a story unfold. It's beautiful without being glossy, fantastical while still being real. It's a more honest reflection of how human memory and perception work and sort of mimics how one might review their life when reflecting back upon it.
Despite how in love I am with the aesthetics and externals of PT Anderson's craft, the story of The Master itself was not a very compelling one. Not even the combined brilliance of Pheonix and Hoffman (utterly at the full reach of their capabilities as actors) was enough to hook my full attention.
I think what makes a cult premise so fascinating is the creepiness factor, which was not at all exploited to its full effect here. I needed to be gradually brainwashed right along with the main character and I needed to find myself by the end of the movie suddenly waking up to the situation and asking myself "what the hell am I doing here with all of these strange people?" A movie that does this very, very well would be Rosemary's Baby.
Perhaps it was the absence of a sane character for me to vicariously experience the chain of events through that is to blame for my inability to connect to the story.
Exceptional. The visuals were works of art, the music was powerful, and the two central performances were some of the finest acting I have ever seen, one the psychotic father, the other the needy son. It is a detached and quite languid look not only at characters, but at themes and cultures, at institutions themselves. Because the pace and tone are quite dreamlike, it allows you to view two sides of the coin at the same time, it invites you to think and draw your own conclusions, it respects your intelligence.
It shows just how cults both need and prey on the desperate seekers, the shocked and abused, by mixing pop psychology, science fiction writings, cult of personality, New Age teachings, Eastern mysticism, and the laws of social influence. They gradually chew away at the critical thinking facilities of their followers, a bite at a time, just enough not to notice, patiently and persistently until all sense of questioning, and all sense of innocent curiosity, is surrendered into a new life of quiet submission. They play on, as the villain Loki so cannily pointed out in The Avengers earlier this year, 'man's desire to submit', by both defusing objections and telling us what we secretly want to hear, out of a desperate need to feel part of something. As a spiritual person who's intrigued in the new age, I'm more than intrigued by the idea of past lives, cellular memory, and the curative nature of exploring these notions through psychotherapy, whether the mechanics are based on ultimate principle or indeed imagined. As a thinking person who has been duped by those who use lies, semantics, and reframing, through the truths spiritual ideas seek to present, I am both disturbed at my potential gullibility given the right circumstances, and repulsed by those who present liberation on one hand; and incredible systematic psychological and financial abuse on the other. The line of confusion is trod so well in this work it shocked me even deeper into a perpetual state of vigilance; having sought spiritual and medicinal healing for a serious ailment myself, and having had to examine the end result to about 4 layers of personal analysis to determine the truth for myself, this cut extremely deep.
This work is a true piece of ART. It's length and it's tone will turn a lot of people off, but thank God for that. It has many themes: the means of distorting the past, the means of discerning the present, the purpose of imagination in creating the future, our need for resolution, the nature of the mind's confusion, the desire to WANT to believe, the outpicturing of parental figures, dominance versus submission, and how all systems have to assume that you are a broken being in order to gain your membership - after all, the whole pretense behind many institutions is that you are both broken and *cannot do it on your own*.
Overall, this is a film that is dealing with ideas in the grand tradition, but in a very particular way - a suggestive, quiet mental invasion of deconstruction, that builds to a disturbing and intense ideological climax. There is minimal narrative. Everything is inferred in chilling lockstep with the ideas presented. It's panoramas and pace are slow for a reason, they have a seductive quality which act like a mindvirus, disturbingly plausible in how they unfold, through Freddie's psychosexual, petulant outbursts and earnest tears, through the final scene where master and slave are together, brimming with barely controlled grief and rage - The Master delivering song-as-nursery-rhyme, yet quivering lips and all, it's electric and majestic, son betraying father, expanding into a kind of biblical...outrage...that seems to have infused itself into our culture today, and so jolted my alerted mind into observation. It's perhaps a little too long, but that's ultimately a false sense of security. Far from pretentious, it seeks to unravel the pretention of persuasion in communication. It dares to suggest that all belief may end in its own undoing, and that your most sacred truths contain enough lies to unravel themselves - and this idea is interweaved enough into the fabric of The Master with a treading, deliberate intensity. Ultimately, as I read it, it's an pipebomb against all ideological structures that have an agenda, creeping under your skin and into your heart, naming your most sacred cow as its most sworn enemy, with such subtle brilliance that you don't know what you've watched until it's too late. But most of the audience won't be able to get a handle on the eerie feeling they've got, and some of those will come back for more. (Just like a cult). I LOVED it.
A script with the potential of being a masterpiece. But PTA misses to link the story to the viewer, it leaves out the connection at times and lets you grab into the air at the end. The directing is excellent though, as are the performances (notably by Phoenix).
The Master is really about Dianetics, isn't it? Or the Urantia Foundation. Any of those self-actualization "cults" that sprang up in the 50s and 60s and which produced what I've always called "brainwashing books". Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the L. Ron Hubbard figure, a modern mystic toying with pop psychology and science fiction ideas, regressing his followers to their past lives where the problems of today might find their source and cure. The story is told from the point of view of Joaquin Phoenix's character, Freddie, a disturbed and somewhat simple-minded WWII veteran who comes under the Master's sway, but seems the most improbable person to ever get something out of "the Cause". As with most of P.T. Anderson's films, there's a meandering quality to the work that's at once a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it uses memory in the same way the Master's "processing" does, but on the other, it wears on the audience's patience, clocking in at probably a half-hour too long. Its underlying themes are a bit opaque to me still, so this is likely to be a film I truly discover on the second or third viewing. It's a critique of the power of cult, an apocalyptic father-son story, and gloriously humanistic, but the narrative is so low-key that I have a hard time grasping it whole.
Very good. Deep rich characters within the first 20 minutes. The film has an Aronofsky feel to it. A bit surreal and a bit like the directors prior work with intense characters. Hoffman was amazing as were most of the cast. Wonderful to look at... The story did veer a bit and the audience I was drifted a bit.
Phoenix channels a protoJoker in this. It's not as great as I hoped but it's interesting 7/10
Some of the casting. Jesse as Hoffman's son was great as they looked sunset but the love interest and daughter were too similar and confused a few, the audio want great at times either
A greatly increased appreciation upon a much put-off second viewing is mostly a result of Jeremy Ratzlaff's video essay on the Chronological Timeline of PTA's work. Even so, my initial lukewarm reaction was due in part to a slight disappointment with its status as PTA's follow-up to the Daniel Day-Lewis show.
Amongst PTA's oeuvre of masterpieces and near-perfection, The Master stands as the master key to unlock the relationships between all of his central characters. Thanks in part to Ratzlaff's essay, an argument can be made that beyond PTA's recurring theme of father issues, there is a cinematic universe within his films that exhibits the spiritual evolution of a man. Quell and Dodd, Plainview and Sunday, Doc and Bigfoot, John and Sydney, Dirk and Jack Horner are all mirrors of each other with complimentary desires and approaches that if both are able to reconcile their nature to combat their mirror and learn to love that which they are but loathe about the other, they will finally be able to break free of samsara. In Hard Eight, John/Quell/Plainview/Dirk finally find love but it is not with Sydney/Dodd/Sunday/Horner, that is why the next time we see this spirit incarnated in Magnolia, it is at least eight different people. Fortunately, by the end the spirit as able to reconcile its lessons but must face one final test in Punch-Drunk Love before finally being free of the cycle.
As he continues to make films, it remains difficult to formulate a Grand Unified Paul Thomas Anderson (GUPTA) theory, so I will leave with one final thought: The Master is unjustly overlooked and grossly misunderstood, but with it PT Anderson further establishes his place as not just one of the greatest living film directors but as one of the Greatest of All-Time™.
@underwaterhesus: Jim Carrey is strongly associated with comedic roles, so of course no-one would take this picture serious if Carrey played Freddie Quell. Therefore you can't compare these two possibilities and say The Master is only a great picture because of the superb acting; it's more than that. Casting, among many things.
Add your comment
Comments 1 - 15 of 37
Paulo Martins
Joaquin Phoenix, you are the best of your generation!tndouglas
Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman were spectacular. The movie was well done, but boring.MinesofMoria
Wish the plot was as strong as Joaquin Phoenix's acting.dombrewer
Like the previous couple of commentators I was blown away by the quality of the performances in this, P.T. Anderson's follow up to the stellar "There Will Be Blood", particularly from Joaquin Phoenix who completely transforms himself and vanishes into the part - you can practically smell his performance it is so pungent and desperate. Hoffman and Adams are also as great, as expected. Special mention must also go to the exceptional art direction, costuming and cinematography - every thing is perfectly in its place to evoke a genuine sense of early 1950s America. The only problem for me was the wandering, circular nature of the plot and the sometimes oblique narrative. It's engrossing, but so determined to alienate, ends up being confusing. There are stunning scenes - Freddie's first "processing" by Lancaster on the boat was so good I barely remembered to breathe for five minutes. I'm looking forward to watching it again.ninrutgib
Phenomenal performance by Joaquin Phoenix. SImply stunning.devilsadvocado
I think the Malickesque style/format of filmmaking is the purest vessel through which to not tell a story, but to let a story unfold. It's beautiful without being glossy, fantastical while still being real. It's a more honest reflection of how human memory and perception work and sort of mimics how one might review their life when reflecting back upon it.Despite how in love I am with the aesthetics and externals of PT Anderson's craft, the story of The Master itself was not a very compelling one. Not even the combined brilliance of Pheonix and Hoffman (utterly at the full reach of their capabilities as actors) was enough to hook my full attention.
I think what makes a cult premise so fascinating is the creepiness factor, which was not at all exploited to its full effect here. I needed to be gradually brainwashed right along with the main character and I needed to find myself by the end of the movie suddenly waking up to the situation and asking myself "what the hell am I doing here with all of these strange people?" A movie that does this very, very well would be Rosemary's Baby.
Perhaps it was the absence of a sane character for me to vicariously experience the chain of events through that is to blame for my inability to connect to the story.
HEMA
The story didn't interest me one bit, but the acting was superbAdmiral Softy
I'm left with a profound appreciation for Joaquin Phoenix's facial features.Scratch47
Exceptional. The visuals were works of art, the music was powerful, and the two central performances were some of the finest acting I have ever seen, one the psychotic father, the other the needy son. It is a detached and quite languid look not only at characters, but at themes and cultures, at institutions themselves. Because the pace and tone are quite dreamlike, it allows you to view two sides of the coin at the same time, it invites you to think and draw your own conclusions, it respects your intelligence.It shows just how cults both need and prey on the desperate seekers, the shocked and abused, by mixing pop psychology, science fiction writings, cult of personality, New Age teachings, Eastern mysticism, and the laws of social influence. They gradually chew away at the critical thinking facilities of their followers, a bite at a time, just enough not to notice, patiently and persistently until all sense of questioning, and all sense of innocent curiosity, is surrendered into a new life of quiet submission. They play on, as the villain Loki so cannily pointed out in The Avengers earlier this year, 'man's desire to submit', by both defusing objections and telling us what we secretly want to hear, out of a desperate need to feel part of something. As a spiritual person who's intrigued in the new age, I'm more than intrigued by the idea of past lives, cellular memory, and the curative nature of exploring these notions through psychotherapy, whether the mechanics are based on ultimate principle or indeed imagined. As a thinking person who has been duped by those who use lies, semantics, and reframing, through the truths spiritual ideas seek to present, I am both disturbed at my potential gullibility given the right circumstances, and repulsed by those who present liberation on one hand; and incredible systematic psychological and financial abuse on the other. The line of confusion is trod so well in this work it shocked me even deeper into a perpetual state of vigilance; having sought spiritual and medicinal healing for a serious ailment myself, and having had to examine the end result to about 4 layers of personal analysis to determine the truth for myself, this cut extremely deep.
This work is a true piece of ART. It's length and it's tone will turn a lot of people off, but thank God for that. It has many themes: the means of distorting the past, the means of discerning the present, the purpose of imagination in creating the future, our need for resolution, the nature of the mind's confusion, the desire to WANT to believe, the outpicturing of parental figures, dominance versus submission, and how all systems have to assume that you are a broken being in order to gain your membership - after all, the whole pretense behind many institutions is that you are both broken and *cannot do it on your own*.
Overall, this is a film that is dealing with ideas in the grand tradition, but in a very particular way - a suggestive, quiet mental invasion of deconstruction, that builds to a disturbing and intense ideological climax. There is minimal narrative. Everything is inferred in chilling lockstep with the ideas presented. It's panoramas and pace are slow for a reason, they have a seductive quality which act like a mindvirus, disturbingly plausible in how they unfold, through Freddie's psychosexual, petulant outbursts and earnest tears, through the final scene where master and slave are together, brimming with barely controlled grief and rage - The Master delivering song-as-nursery-rhyme, yet quivering lips and all, it's electric and majestic, son betraying father, expanding into a kind of biblical...outrage...that seems to have infused itself into our culture today, and so jolted my alerted mind into observation. It's perhaps a little too long, but that's ultimately a false sense of security. Far from pretentious, it seeks to unravel the pretention of persuasion in communication. It dares to suggest that all belief may end in its own undoing, and that your most sacred truths contain enough lies to unravel themselves - and this idea is interweaved enough into the fabric of The Master with a treading, deliberate intensity. Ultimately, as I read it, it's an pipebomb against all ideological structures that have an agenda, creeping under your skin and into your heart, naming your most sacred cow as its most sworn enemy, with such subtle brilliance that you don't know what you've watched until it's too late. But most of the audience won't be able to get a handle on the eerie feeling they've got, and some of those will come back for more. (Just like a cult). I LOVED it.
maxpge
A script with the potential of being a masterpiece. But PTA misses to link the story to the viewer, it leaves out the connection at times and lets you grab into the air at the end. The directing is excellent though, as are the performances (notably by Phoenix).8/10
Louis Mazzini
A masterpiece. Even better the second watch.Siskoid
The Master is really about Dianetics, isn't it? Or the Urantia Foundation. Any of those self-actualization "cults" that sprang up in the 50s and 60s and which produced what I've always called "brainwashing books". Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the L. Ron Hubbard figure, a modern mystic toying with pop psychology and science fiction ideas, regressing his followers to their past lives where the problems of today might find their source and cure. The story is told from the point of view of Joaquin Phoenix's character, Freddie, a disturbed and somewhat simple-minded WWII veteran who comes under the Master's sway, but seems the most improbable person to ever get something out of "the Cause". As with most of P.T. Anderson's films, there's a meandering quality to the work that's at once a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it uses memory in the same way the Master's "processing" does, but on the other, it wears on the audience's patience, clocking in at probably a half-hour too long. Its underlying themes are a bit opaque to me still, so this is likely to be a film I truly discover on the second or third viewing. It's a critique of the power of cult, an apocalyptic father-son story, and gloriously humanistic, but the narrative is so low-key that I have a hard time grasping it whole.boulderman
Very good. Deep rich characters within the first 20 minutes. The film has an Aronofsky feel to it. A bit surreal and a bit like the directors prior work with intense characters. Hoffman was amazing as were most of the cast. Wonderful to look at... The story did veer a bit and the audience I was drifted a bit.Phoenix channels a protoJoker in this. It's not as great as I hoped but it's interesting 7/10
Some of the casting. Jesse as Hoffman's son was great as they looked sunset but the love interest and daughter were too similar and confused a few, the audio want great at times either
fonz
A greatly increased appreciation upon a much put-off second viewing is mostly a result of Jeremy Ratzlaff's video essay on the Chronological Timeline of PTA's work. Even so, my initial lukewarm reaction was due in part to a slight disappointment with its status as PTA's follow-up to the Daniel Day-Lewis show.Amongst PTA's oeuvre of masterpieces and near-perfection, The Master stands as the master key to unlock the relationships between all of his central characters. Thanks in part to Ratzlaff's essay, an argument can be made that beyond PTA's recurring theme of father issues, there is a cinematic universe within his films that exhibits the spiritual evolution of a man. Quell and Dodd, Plainview and Sunday, Doc and Bigfoot, John and Sydney, Dirk and Jack Horner are all mirrors of each other with complimentary desires and approaches that if both are able to reconcile their nature to combat their mirror and learn to love that which they are but loathe about the other, they will finally be able to break free of samsara. In Hard Eight, John/Quell/Plainview/Dirk finally find love but it is not with Sydney/Dodd/Sunday/Horner, that is why the next time we see this spirit incarnated in Magnolia, it is at least eight different people. Fortunately, by the end the spirit as able to reconcile its lessons but must face one final test in Punch-Drunk Love before finally being free of the cycle.
As he continues to make films, it remains difficult to formulate a Grand Unified Paul Thomas Anderson (GUPTA) theory, so I will leave with one final thought: The Master is unjustly overlooked and grossly misunderstood, but with it PT Anderson further establishes his place as not just one of the greatest living film directors but as one of the Greatest of All-Time™.
Gershwin
@underwaterhesus: Jim Carrey is strongly associated with comedic roles, so of course no-one would take this picture serious if Carrey played Freddie Quell. Therefore you can't compare these two possibilities and say The Master is only a great picture because of the superb acting; it's more than that. Casting, among many things.Showing items 1 – 15 of 37