Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is absorbing, troubling and superbly acted, with Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman making an uneasy attachment feel painfully necessary. It loses momentum, but the performances give us reason enough to stay.
The Master is a disturbing, absorbing drama whose performances keep us interested when its story begins to drift. Paul Thomas Anderson follows a troubled veteran into the company of a charismatic leader in post-war America, then pays close attention to how much each man needs the other. There is room here for affection, vanity and the wish to be told how to live. The performances make those needs hard to separate, though the film spends longer exploring them than it can always justify.
As Freddie Quell, Joaquin Phoenix makes self-disgust difficult to look at without turning it into a plea for sympathy. We found him painful to watch: the drunkenness and erratic behaviour carry the weariness of someone who cannot get comfortable with himself. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives Lancaster Dodd enough warmth to make Freddie’s attraction credible. His authority has the assurance of a man accustomed to being listened to, and his interest in Freddie complicates it. We can understand the appeal of his company without accepting his right to take charge.
Amy Adams, as Peggy Dodd, keeps the relationship from becoming a closed conversation between the two leads. She gives the community a firmness that makes Dodd’s fascination with Freddie seem a potentially troublesome indulgence. That is a valuable complication in a drama about a cult, where exposing the leader as a fraud would be the easy way to proceed. Paul Thomas Anderson is more interested in why someone might stay, even when belonging requires an uncomfortable degree of obedience.
Cinematographers Baz Idoine and Mihai Malaimare Jr. give the film images worth looking at for longer than the story strictly requires. The opening view of a ship’s wake is particularly absorbing, and its return gives us something familiar to hold on to amid Freddie’s uncertainty. The 65mm photography gives a private, uncomfortable attachment the visual scale we might expect from a much busier period drama. There are stretches when looking becomes the main pleasure, which helps explain both the fascination and the impatience the film can produce.
Production designers Jack Fisk and David Crank make the period setting convincing without making its accuracy the main attraction. The period detail helps us accept the community as somewhere a lost veteran might seek a home, which matters when the leader’s appeal might otherwise seem remote. Jonny Greenwood’s score is less reassuring. Its restlessness keeps the film uneasy even when we have begun to settle into the men’s company, and supplies some of the momentum the storytelling occasionally lacks.
Editors Leslie Jones and Peter McNulty let the story move unevenly, with gaps and changes of emphasis that suit Freddie’s instability. This is often effective, since a neat account of his progress would make him easier to explain than the performance allows. It also means the film can revisit the same attraction and resistance without making either more revealing. At 137 minutes, it has room for uncertainty, but the later stretches sometimes ask us to treat another unsettled encounter as a development, and we felt our attention slacken.
That drift is a real limitation, and patience will not make every passage necessary. Still, the actors keep finding recognisable need in people whose behaviour can be forbidding, and the film gives their attachment an emotional weight that an explanation of the cult could scarcely improve. We recommend it for those performances and for its willingness to make companionship this uncomfortable. Choose it when there is time to watch closely, and no requirement that everyone make sense.
