something else about the movie “The Master”

In the last scene with both Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), Dodd tells Freddie to leave him forever, saying, "Go to that landless latitude, and good luck—for if you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you'd be the first person in the history of the world."

Lancaster and Freddie are drawn to each other. Lancaster suggests a few times that he and Freddie are cosmically connected, that they knew each other in a previous life. Both Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd improvise in life.

But Lancaster feels the pressure of his followers' expectations, their fragile devotion, and his determined spouse, Peggy (Amy Adams).

Freddie represents something like freedom. He is wild. He gets out of control and does not try to control others. He seems to have no views. And he claims to do what he wants.

His relationship with Dodd is Freddie's only meaningful one since before the war when he courted a young girl. The relationship with Dodd gave Freddie a taste of intimacy.

But Dodd cannot pursue life with Freddie. Freddie is too damaged, too unstable, too uncontrollable, and Lancaster has too many commitments. Moreover, Peggy will not allow it. So Lancaster will carry on without him, and Freddie will drift away alone.

Notes:

• Peggy is an ominous, constant source of pressure. She immediately puts a stop to nudity at meetings of The Cause, and she pushes him away from Freddie.
• Freddie experiences intimacy when Doris (Madisen Beaty) sings to him. And he experiences intimacy again during the Lancaster-Freddie processing scene, among others. And early in the movie, we see Freddie pretending to have sex on the beach with a woman shaped from sand; the movie ends with a shot of Freddie lying still, almost sweetly, next to the sand woman on the beach.
• Now I am patting myself on the back for my 2013 post, "about the film "The Master," noting something that is beautifully expanded on in this piece in The New Yorker: “The Astonishing Power of ‘The Master’” by Richard Brody, September10, 2012.
  

 

Loss

Philip Seymour Hoffman, 1967-2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

about the film "The Master"

Who is the master? And who can live without serving a master?

In the 2012 film The Master, Freddie Quell—a character brought into curdled life by the singular Joaquin Phoenix—drifts and crashes from one moment to the next, his troubled life being one corrosive improvisation. Quell is a haunted World War II vet with no aim beyond staying intoxicated and self-destructing.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a philosophical movement known as "The Cause." His critics charge that Dodd improvises his philosophy from moment to moment, that he is a fraud. But his followers see an enlightened, intense visionary.

Quell is tortured, intense, rough, gaunt, uneducated, drawn to poisons and pain; Dodd is composed, graceful, educated, well-dressed, plump, and drawn to the spotlight. When the film debuted, critics wondered, What, if anything, does the film say? say about our talk of freedom and our readiness to serve a master? about the inevitable disappointment that comes with looking up to someone? about faith? belief?

Maybe Dodd serves more than one master: he serves his audience's expectations, his wife, his vanity and ego. He is intrigued by Phoenix, drawn by his intensity and desperation. Each man is fed and inspired by the interest and attention of the other; each man is the other's project, and each can take the other to the next improvised step, wherever it may lead.

The Master is fantastic, unorthodox, beautiful, grimy, and searing.


Note:
The Master was written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson and stars Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams.

In The New Yorker piece, "“Death of a Salesman”: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Mediocrity", staff writer/blogger Giles Harvey says Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" isn't so hot. True, Miller is no Shakespeare, but rather than defend either Miller or Harvey, I'll just point out one thing in his critique.

Harvey opens with a story about criticism he received as a creative writing student:

I once had a creative-writing teacher who would tactfully condemn a line of student verse by saying, in the long-suffering yet indulgent tone with which a wife might scold her husband for once again forgetting to put the cat out, “It sounds like poetry.” ...

What our teacher was complaining about, it now seems obvious, was the tendency of students to cloak our rather banal thoughts and impressions in a poetical gauze—our tendency, after reading Keats, say, to fill our poems with bowers and nightingales and long, slow vowels.

Then begins Harvey's critique, which argues that the conflicts and issues in Miller's classic are not conveyed with enough subtlety, that "In “Salesman” there is always a straight line leading from a harrowing past event to a present neurosis or failure." Moreover, "Characters are explained, exposed, insisted upon; but Miller rarely allows them to stray into the kind of tantalizing opacity and incoherence that makes the people in, say, Chekhov or Shakespeare seem so real." In other words, Miller failed to cloak his banal thoughts in a poetical gaze.

Note:

• My criticizing the author's apparent inconsistency might not be spot-on, but his criticism misses (or ignores) some big targets, too.
• Harvey had just seen Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman.

Jack Goes Boating

Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance as Jack in Jack Goes Boating reminds me of Wilson, his character in Love Liza. Jack is a stunted man just awakening to possibility, and the movie ends with him starting a new phase of life through a relationship with a woman who understands him; Wilson had a good relationship and professional life, but the movie begins when that phase abruptly ends, his wife having just committed suicide, wounding him indefinitely. Jack is getting up, whereas Wilson is falling, perhaps landing at the movie's end. These films resemble snapshots but unfold narratives every bit as epic as that of Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings.

Although Jack is painfully quiet, Hoffman broadcasts Jack's inhibitions and insecurity by prescribing a subdued nervousness to the character's bearing. But we also witness Jack's sweet, gentle spirit when he listens repeatedly to his favorite song, the limited soundtrack he's assigned to his compact existence. Philip Seymour Hoffman is the best actor we have.