The Master (2012)

Freddie Quell is one of the most disgusting characters I have ever seen in film. From the very first moments of The Master, Freddie proves himself irredeemably corrupt and consistently so. Near the beginning of the movie, he is working at a department store taking photographs. He assaults a customer for no real reason, and is quickly out of work. He then creates an alcoholic concoction that involves oil, and which poisons an acquaintance. He runs from this, ending up on a ship heading for New York, which is carrying a man named Lancaster Dodd and his followers. Paul Thomas Anderson, who wrote and directed the film, claims that Dodd was based on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Throughout the film, as Dodd attempts to fully convert Freddie to the ideas of the "Cause," we glimpse many of their practices and hear much of what they believe, and it all incredibly stupid. I think this quiet mockery is the base of Anderson's movie. He knew the comparison to Scientology and its reactions would happen and he embraces them. His movie is not the criticism of a cult, but the study of a character.

That character, as I already mentioned, is extremely horrible. I was reminded of A Clockwork Orange's Alex, except this guy is worse. I have wondered why Anderson would want to so thoroughly focus on a person so wretched and i think it's because of how good it makes Dodd look. Dodd is the master of the title, after all, and even though Anderson doesn't believe the man is right ("He's making it up as he goes," Dodd's son remarks.), he does think very highly of his abilities to heal. Freddie is despicable because he gets our attention. Humanity is naturally drawn to ugliness, even if that attraction is built around hatred. The Master is such a fascinating movie because it doesn't stay in film's usual comfort zone. We are drawn in from the get-go by how unapologetically vile it is, but it wouldn't be a great movie just for following evil around. It sustains our interest by ultimately questioning why we are interested in the first place. There is an extended scene where Freddie is being inducted to the Cause by undergoing a long series of maddening tests. The movie is unrelenting in this lengthy montage that becomes so infuriating that we become just as upset as Freddie. Until that moment, I had been watching the movie from a distance, loving the unignorable style and polish, but afraid to invest in it. Without meaning to, the movie made me relate to a person I thought was impossible to like. The movie, warts and all, was so good, it forced me into involvement.

I cannot explain in text how perfect the performances of the movie are. Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie is career-defining. Anderson has said that Phoenix's devotion to the character was similar to when Daniel Day Lewis starred in his There Will Be Blood, one of the greatest films of the decade. Creeping about in a slight hunch and a weirdly crooked face, Phoenix embodies the character physically with the same determination he approaches it mentally. His violent outbursts, crude mumblings and unquenchable thirst seem so real, I do not think of the character as fiction or as a performance by a movie star. That is when acting overcomes itself and becomes something else. The team of Anderson's direction and Phoenix's acting has created pure cinema, with all the frills left out and saved for the next blockbuster. They are assisted by two other equally powerful performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams and by Johnny Greenwood's haunting score, which filled the movie with an unshakeable dread that helps more perfectly mold the dirty image being portrayed.

I am doing The Master an incredible injustice by building it up simultaneously as an awe-inspiring work of art and an ugly piece of trash, which is sure to inspire ideas of the sort of thing it isn't. This will make anyone who sees it based on my review be dissapointed and probably even annoyed by my praise of it. I am not recommending this movie to anyone. I loved it because it personally moved me in a way others will not experience. I thought it was beautiful, interesting, eerie and entirely amazing. I understand that I am one of the few.

10/10