The Master (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image
A
Sound A
Extras A-
starring
Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern
written
and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

click any image to enlarge

by
Walter Chaw Of all the
recognizable and memorable phrases that John Keats contributed to the
English
language, this ranks high:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet
breathing.

It's the opening of his four-book
"Endymion", a work that spans roughly 4,000 lines and recounts a
semi-obscure myth about a shepherd beloved by the moon goddess, Selene,
that
Terrence Malick was set to tell in Q, his aborted
follow-up to Days of
Heaven. I mention it because Paul Thomas Anderson's The
Master looks
and acts like a Terrence Malick film in its sublimity and Romanticism.
I
mention it, too, because The Master can be read
as a loose adaptation of
the first book in Keats's cycle. When hero Freddie Quell (Joaquin
Phoenix)
tells an army shrink that what he's really suffering from isn't
shellshock but
"nostalgia," The Master identifies itself as
something Keatsian
as opposed to something from Thomas Pynchon (as its opening would
suggest) or
Joseph Heller (as its humour would). Interested in neither satire nor Citizen
Kane-esque excoriation of a public figure, the picture seeks
instead to
present belief systems and seekers of truth as ridiculous before the
sharpness
of knowledge gained through experience. It suggests that there is only
experience–everything else is the anticipation of it or the
disappointed
post-coital regard of it–and that all of life's aspirations are
directed at
experience. For Keats, that sublimity in abeyance meant an
eternal
suspension, a "consummation sublime" where action, fleet, gave way
too quickly to a destruction of some holy ideal. A thing of beauty is a
joy
only until the point that it's known, worried over, worked through,
robbed of
its poetry and, with it, some measure of eternity. I don't agree with
that, but
I understand the sentiment.

The first time Freddie tries to get laid,
his partner is a woman made of sand, and it doesn't get any better from
there as he
washes out of the Navy, finds himself a photographer drinking cocktails
of
developing fluid ("an endless fountain of immortal drink, Pouring unto
us
from heaven's brink"), adrift with itinerant workers, and finally the
right hand of author/cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour
Hoffman), upon
whose boat he stows away one night. He has a girlfriend too young for
him
(Madisen Beaty), and so he goes away; once he returns, she's gone and
lives on
as a shining thing–an object of nostalgia and the
self-diagnosed
cause of
his madness. I think he's not far wrong. But The Master
is about more
than lost love; it's about the loss of idealism and, in that way, it
represents
an unusual conversation about the "Greatest Generation," about how we
see them and how they see themselves in one sense. And in the direct
reference
to John Huston's long-suppressed shellshock documentary Let
There Be Light
(1946), it's about how their vision of the world was changed by their
participation in the last "just" conflagration. Film has always
hinted around at the disconnect between this and our elevation of this
generation as
paladins of light with the noir cycle, Anthony
Mann's dark westerns, even the roles that everybody's all-American
Jimmy Stewart chose upon
his
return from the Front. What The Master does is
present its vision of
failed attempts at epiphany through that lens of our men returned from
war and
the idea, eternally ironic, that these conversations we have through
the agency
of art (poetry, film, music, and the rest) are always had at a remove
from the
actual living of life.

Dodd is a jack-of-all-trades huckster not unlike, as
it's been widely documented, L. Ron Hubbard. He, like Hubbard, is at
the head
of a quasi-scientific movement that marries elements of psychiatry with
physical science, seeking through regression therapy and other New Age
mind-trips…truth? Beauty? Functionally, it seems to strip away
artifice from
the feeble-minded and others seeking a path through the bramble, to
make
them more susceptible to Dodd's suggestions and gathering sway. Freddie
becomes
Dodd's enforcer and chief mixologist, applying his experience
fashioning impromptu drinks from
torpedo
fuel to the task of intoxicating Dodd. The
intoxication
appears mutual. There's a scene about midway through where Freddie
and
Dodd are in jail together in separate cells. Freddie begs
for Truth
from Dodd, for one authentic thing. It occurs immediately after another
moment in which Dodd's son (Jesse Plemons, on the verge) warns Freddie
that his
father is
making things up as he goes along. But the revelation that Dodd doesn't
have a
blueprint for the universe isn't the conflict of the piece, nor is the
tension
as to when or if Freddie will discover he's following a fraud. Rather,
that
Dodd is lost is part of a larger reality that all the characters in the
film
are lost and so are we. There's a brilliant scene where
Dodd is confronted
with passages in his new book that directly contradict laws set forth
in his
old one that touches on the terror that pulling back the skin of the
world
reveals only hungry chaos underneath. It isn't just Dodd, it's not just
Freddie, it's implication–yes, sublime implication–that the only
truth is
something as impossible to define and ephemeral, yet completely
universal and
all-compelling, as Beauty.

Now, if this earthly love has power to make
Men's being mortal, immortal; to shake
Ambition from their memories, and brim
Their measure of content; what merest whim,
Seems all this poor endeavour after fame,
To one, who keeps within his steadfast aim
A love immortal, an immortal too.

For Anderson (for Keats, too),
"Beauty" in this sense is the promise of consummation–of physical
completion and release, knowing, even in the process of it, that the
aftermath
is hollowness and self-loathing. The thing that
pulls The Master
from vignette to vignette along Freddie's journey is
the characters'
futility in trying to enjoy a "natural" physical relationship.
Consider Dodd getting jerked off by his harridan wife (Amy Adams), or
Freddie's vision of all the women naked at a party, unattainable
and
mocking. Or consider the moment where Freddie goes back to claim his
child
bride–she's gone, and only her mother is there to console him in the
twilight.
Then consider that the final shot of the film is Freddie in joyful
coitus at
last, laughing about Dodd's discoveries and revelations, each to a one made
ridiculous in
the face of the friction between cock and pussy. It's edifying to this
idea
that rapture, Truth, only occurs in the immediate, literal ecstasy of
the act
that Anderson ends his
picture
right in the middle of Freddie reaching this moment in his journey.
Freddie's victory is fleeting–the victory
against
the anxiety before and the fear after is always
fleeting–but the image
of it
is a lovely rhyme of another that occurs earlier when, during one of
Freddie's
"sessions" with Dodd, Anderson peers in through a picture window to
see our hero encased, gazing out, his hands flat against the glass.
The
brilliance of Anderson's entire oeuvre, looking
back, is that it
consists of smart movies about the boxes we build for ourselves when we
overthink things–when we create things to substitute for biological
creation,
or build religions on foundations of dissociation and loneliness.
It's at
once a critique against criticism, and a recognition that our lives are
constructed of brief moments and then long intervals between
them
that we
spend trying to contextualize those moments, or refashion them
into
something more permanent.

Phoenix is remarkable. Bent into a
question mark throughout, he is the literalization of the modern man
lost, all
muttering and distraction and retreats into distorted, modified
realities. He
is Dodd's greatest challenge because he represents the urge to seek
without the
commensurate idea of an object to be sought. He's on a quest, but
there is no
grail. The end of the journey is a launch into maelstroms over
water–it's in
this way that Romanticism gave way to Naturalism, then Modernism.
What
Phoenix does is create a vortex, and it's astonishing work. Hoffman is
likewise
astounding as a creature of desperation and fictions. It's not so much
his
words as his desire to contextualize the Universe; his task as Dodd is
to
contain a void–and it's fruitless work, of course, though it's in our
essential nature to undertake it just the same. If Freddie represents
our
Natural state, Dodd represents our desire to contextualize that within
ourselves; the wonder of The Master is that in
the end, the only
conclusion it can offer is that we should stand up from our screens and
go for
a walk, preferably naked, in the wild woods and howl. Life is for the
living of
it, and we are too, too devoured by nostalgia and regret. A perfect
film to
watch with Jane Campion's Bright Star, The
Master, by itself, gives lie to the idea that Americans don't make great, nuanced, complicated
films.
It's sublime.

THE
BLU-RAY DISC
by
Bill Chambers On Blu-ray, The Master
has the
almost lacerating clarity you'd expect from something shot
in 70mm
(the actors are beautifully lit but fundamentally deglamorized, with
worry
lines and wind- and sun-chapped skin brought into sharp relief), combined
with the
cleanliness and supple dynamic range that are the hallmarks of
large-format.
Grain does surface in the densest areas of shadow–that's what happens
to
celluloid of any size if you shoot in low-enough light, and this film
often
favours a Gordon Willis darkness. Some handheld material was shot in
35mm but
blends well because of the movement involved, and the cyan-dominant,
photochemical palette is digitally interpreted with fidelity. (The
department-store darkroom's sulphuric gleam looks remarkably
unaffected.) At
less than half the resolution of 70mm, the 1.85:1, 1080p transfer is
obviously
no substitute for the real thing, but it's a hell of an approximation.
The
attendant 5.1 DTS-HD MA track is simultaneously precise and transparent–Jonny Greenwood's score seems to come from the sidewalls. Voices are acoustically persuasive and modulated with
genius against other voices, music, ambience, and a vacuous silence that consumes the soundstage now and again.

Like the compilations on the Punch-Drunk
Love ("Blossoms and Blood") and There Will Be
Blood DVDs,
"Back Beyond" (HD) combines outtakes and deleted scenes into a
montage scored by Greenwood. It's a non-linear but
cohesive
tangle of footage and dialogue fragments that–initially, at
least–seems to
use the "time hole" as its organizing principle, turning Freddie
Quell into Billy Pilgrim as it skips around his life during the service
and in
Lancaster Dodd's service. The piece reveals that Anderson regular
Melora
Walters played the singer in a trio that entertains at Dodd's book
party, as well as an
amusing subplot about Freddie being entrusted with guarding a box
that's a
little unfathomable out of context. "Back Beyond" ends with Hoffman repeatedly
cracking
Phoenix up with a "these pretzels are making me thirsty"-esque line
of dialogue, which feels very cathartic after the picture proper and
this
fairly heavy distillation of it.

"Unguided Message" (8 mins.) is a
standard-def behind-the-scenes featurette that's kind of interesting
for
showing the unseen margins of a convincingly un-movie-like set, and I
like a
part where the unidentified videographer is following Paul Thomas
Anderson and
becomes obviously distracted by a pretty P.A.. Alas, the crappy
camerawork and
lack of structure are alternately torturous and tedious. Last among the
longform extras is John Huston's landmark Let There Be
Light (58
mins.), presented in unrestored SD but still a hell of a purchase
incentive. In
the moment that seems to have most directly inspired The
Master, a black
soldier tells the military doc that he's suffering from nostalgia,
induced by a
photo of his "sweetheart." He goes on a crying jag. "To be
perfectly honestly with you," he tells the shrink, "I'm very much in
love with my sweetheart." It's devastating. Though the movie does have
the
prescribed happy ending of propaganda, that didn't stop the U.S.
government
from blanching at its frankness, and The Master
is a true spiritual
sequel. Nine quasi-experimental teaser trailers for The Master round out the disc. The Anchor Bay BD is bundled with a DVD, a Digital
Copy
download code, and a postcard featuring Lancaster Dodd. Mail it to the
girl back home.

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