The Master (2012)

Regarding Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will be Blood as one of my favorite films, I was eager to watch The Master. I tried not to read about the film beforehand, which was good (it kept me from thinking about scientologists all the time). It's a peculiar film, I must say, uneven, but interesting - difficult not because of how the film is structured, or because of the events it portrays, but difficult, I thought, because it is quite challenging to discern what themes propel the story. But, in the end, it's a good film, though it might not hold up against There Will be Blood.

Post-war USA. The war has ended. Freddie (brilliant Joaquin Phoenix), a GI serving in the army, makes booze out of torpedos, coconut water and other tasty fluids. We know almost nothing about what happened to him during the war, except that there is something haunting him, maybe. Anderson dodges the story about war trauma we've seen in many films. The trauma, whatever it is, is in Freddie's entire body language, his face, his smile, his eyes, but it remains entirely engimatic. He is a drifter, 'booze'-maker, trouble-maker. He lands a job, loses it, lands a new one, gets into trouble. Then he ends up on a boat, gets drunk, and gets to meet the strange 'captain'. The captain, the master, likes Freddie's booze-blends and invites him to be a part of his 'experiments'. It turns out that this man is a leader of a sect selling a hodgepodge of spiritual and biological 'philosophies'. Freddie submits to the master, following the group, believing, not quite believing, rebelling sometimes, submitting again. The master and Freddie - Paul Thomas Anderson brilliantly evokes a form of erotic, violent and repressive closeness.

So what is this film about? Quasi-spirituality? A society gone made, keeping up an appearance of sanity? Traumas? Collective traumas? Submission? All of this, I think, and perhaps most of all we see a story about losing oneself, losing oneself in appearances, rituals, grand-sounding ideas and collective cheering -- the void. Anderson opts for a solution much more complicated than the conventional narrative about how a movements starts off, how it wins some followers and then, its bitter downfall. This is a knotty story that is as much about the relationship between the two men as it is about the movement. Some reviewers complain about lack of character development. For my own part, that was what I found brave about The Master - it doesn't try to fool us into rosy tales about moral growth; instead, the film trudges on in its uncompromising exploration of what it means to be truly lost. 

(One stylistic aspect of The Master I particularly enjoyed was the way it went from one frame to the next in ways that sometimes were very drastic: you were taken to an altogether new place and time, without further explanation of the new situation.)