Glorious 70mm film which is a beautiful and vivid portrait of incompatible friendship and guidance in a world far removed from memory and convention.
There are those out there, equipped with the confidence, charm and charisma which turns all manner of bullshit coming out of their mouth into the most convincing argument postulation heard. Many of them turn into politicians, some advertising agents, and the ones who are far enough over the hump start a pseudo-religious movement, or a cult if we don’t want to sugar coat it. There’s an oratorical art to telling a straight lie and spinning a fantastic web of nonsense without the others suspecting a thing. Keep a straight face – but not vacant and emotionless – eyes drilling the lies into them and deliver your sermon with conviction. My own abilities of weaving a tapestry of inane lies varies from day to day. Some days the people aren’t me are at a loss at what to believe that comes out of my mouth, while on other occasions my facial features will give away the lies, I’m whistling through my teeth or my incredulous mural becomes so complicated that I can’t keep track of all the invisible colours of the thousand tangents I’ve gone on. Which is why lying on print is much easier, for me at least, because if you do end up devoured by a tangent the size of a blue whale, you can eventually squirm your way out of its blowhole and back onto the surf.
Speaking of making it back to the surf from a superfluous tangent, I watched The Master (2012) a few days ago on one of my rare days off. Fine alcohol was being drunk and somewhere around halfway through the film I started seeing double. Though it was hard to concentrate on the splintering images, I made it all the way through and was captivated by each frame. Paul Thomas Anderson has stated several times that this was his favourite film to make, and it becomes abundantly clear why that is. The amount of thought, planning, passion and direction that’s gone into this masterpiece is truly dizzying in its beauty and power. This is certainly Paul Thomas Anderson at his best, reaching the pinnacle of his auteurism. Inducting themselves into the family of fascinatingly ambivalent characters penned by his Anderson’s steady hand are Freddie Quell, a traumatised and terminally lost war veteran, and Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic helm of a religious movement which is slowly gathering momentum across the incredulous plains of America. Dodd takes a liking to Quell because of his erratic and unpredictable behaviour – almost as if to make an example out of him by way of curing him through the powers of The Cause – and because the man can brew some mean spine-whipping moonshine. As Quell is taken in by Dodd and travels around the country with his family, he becomes a sort of rabid blood-hound bodyguard and ruthless fixer for him, but soon it becomes painfully clear that Quell will do more harm than good. This is the point where the conflict begins and their relationship escalates from moment to moment.
The very first thing which casts a powerful trance on the eyes is how visually stupendous this film is. Shot on glorious 70mm stock, the lighting is perfect heaven. Every single sub-atomic detail is highlighted in this hive of brightness and colour. If my mind reeled any further in drunkenness, I could’ve paused the film and sit there counting the individual hairs on each character’s head in the frame, that’s how detailed and vivid it all was. Same goes for the grass, the sand, the water foaming like effervescent shandy across the ocean’s surface as a ship cut its way through. Daytime scenes, especially exterior ones, enjoy the full force of the sunlight captured pleasureful within the camera’s eye, radiating and refracting off the faces and bodies of the characters, the elegant and regal Elizabethan style set and every single element of the mise-en-scéne. It’s almost too idyllic, as if there’s some nefarious vein buried deep underneath through which the bile of some unspeakable plot is flowing. One seems to get a glimpse of that during the night-time scenes, because the lighting pulls a complete 180 there, turning sinister and ominous, distant lights twinkling faintly with the dying breath of hope and normalcy, the threatening indigo which stays hidden underneath the blackness of the night sky suddenly filters through the firmament and gives the panorama an otherworldly air. And that’s not where the absolute beauty of this film stops either, that hyper-detailed 70mm celluloid adds such depth and focus into each scene that the background ceases to be a mere flat backdrop, instead becoming part of everything around it. The vision falls right into the frame and through everything the camera is looking at, and so our eyes don’t just focus on the main characters, but the whole scene in its entirety. The big picture, one frame at a time. When it actually comes to directing out eyes into a particular place, the camera movements assists with pans and zooms, overhead shots and close-ups – in the event that the attention must be given to whatever is happening underneath the skin.
Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd, played by Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman respectively, have a wonderful sort of characterisation which is engaged with one another in a complex swirling dance. A dance in rhythm to the tune of friendship, guidance, trust and just a little pinch of latent homoeroticism. Both are antithetical to one another. The war veteran who can go from passive aggressive to 20 degrees on the south side of insane within a split second, struggling to fit into post-war society, hence fighting and running against anything that comes in his way, because to him if the hammer were to come down on him, it would’ve happened by now. Then there’s the charismatic and composed charlatan who is plying his followers with snake oil beliefs of introspective time travel in order to reconnect with past selves and emancipate the present from its struggles. Cracks begin to form in Dodd’s equanimity whenever the credibility of his teaching are called into question, the moment the light of scrutiny falls over the contours of his teachings, the rage builds up within him and lashes out with all the unnerving speed and sharpness of a sword-whip. Some writers have latched onto the interpretation that the dichotomies of these two gentlemen represent in Quell the angst and rebellion and alienation of the Brando, Dean, Newman and McQueen type characters, while on the other side of the coin you’ve got the composed eloquence of the Welles, Bogart and Grant. There’s a gulf that separates them which is as wide as half a generation, yet there’s an air of wisdom to Dodd – precisely because he tells his bullshit with the conviction of a Jesuit priest. Many have also drawn countless inferences between The Cause and Scientology, my interpretations however are leaning a bit more on the hopelessly fatalist side of things. You’ve got a man who returns to a society which has been far removed from what he remembers it as, the shock is too much to handle and the only way to survive until his boat stops rocking wildly is to defy everything. Coming into the orbit of another man who is defying scientific and religious conventions of the time, basically playing his own god. These two wild cards take a shine to one another and are on the same extreme of two completely different spectrums. Their inherent incompatibility is precisely what makes their friendship so compelling to watch.
Truly one of his best works, this exemplary title is one which just has to be experienced, in any state of mind, because it’s sheer beauty and provocation will shake you out of whatever stupor you’re on the brink of while watching it.
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