The Master Blu-ray Review
Cause and Effect
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, February 5, 2013
Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film,
The Master, arrives on Blu-ray bearing three Oscar
nominations and a shelf of critics' awards, but it's just as likely to divide viewers as
Magnolia
(1999), the most controversial of Anderson's previous works. Though lacking the earlier film's
punishing length and dense plot,
The Master demands just as much effort from viewers—maybe
more. On the surface,
The Master tells a simple story of two outsiders who share a mysterious
connection, but the story always seems to be moving sideways, with neither of the main
characters ever coming into clear focus. The more we learn about each of them, the more elusive
they become. By the end of the film, one would be hard-pressed to say that either man has
completed what, in movie parlance, would be called a character's "journey", and yet one senses
intuitively that
something has happened. You walk out of the theater (or media room) searching
for words to describe just what that something is.
Anderson has been pushing the narrative boundaries of conventional filmmaking for a long time
now, experimenting with how stories can be told, even questioning the very nature of what a
cinematic story can be.
Boogie Nights and
Magnolia fractured traditional dramatic structure into
a series of interconnected mini-dramas.
Punch-Drunk
Love attempted to reinvent romantic
comedy by flipping every traditional element upside down (including using Adam Sandler's
familiar man-child as the romantic lead).
There Will
Be Blood appeared to tell a story of the early
days of oil drilling but gradually revealed itself to be about a soul's damnation, as foreshadowed
in the title and the multiple meanings of the film's final line ("I'm finished").
The Master is Anderson's boldest experiment yet with narrative form, because it kicks away
much of the familiar scaffolding we use to keep our footing in a story, while at the same time
commanding our attention with entrancing images, hypnotic sound and enthralling performances.
Themes, connections and emotions multiply on subsequent viewings.
The Master is a film that
will be slowly discovered and assimilated over time. I've seen it twice, and I already want to see
it again. But it only takes one viewing to recognize that Anderson has created something
remarkable.
The central character of
The Master is a World War II Navy veteran named Freddie Quell
(Joaquin Phoenix), who may or may not be suffering from shell shock, or what we now call
"PTSD", after fighting on the Pacific front. We see Freddie receiving treatment in a military
hospital, along with other veterans, but as details of his life before the war emerge during the
course of the film, it becomes evident that Freddie was already badly damaged before he joined
the Navy. It's possible, even likely, that the war simply enlarged the fractures that life had
already cracked into his character.
What we quickly learn about Freddie is that he drinks indiscriminately, including home brews
made with petroleum products; is obsessed with sex; and has what would today be called anger
management issues that make him prone to sudden violent outbursts and physical confrontations.
After the war, he's unable to hold down a steady job.
One night, while working as a field hand on a Northern California farm, Freddie flees an
altercation with fellow workers and, by chance hops onto a yacht departing San Francisco Bay.
The temporary captain is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a charismatic and evasive
purveyor of a therapy-cum-philosophy dubbed "The Cause". Freddie initially laughs at Dodd's
pronouncements, as he laughs at most things that make him uncomfortable, but he is gradually
drawn into Dodd's world on the long voyage to New York City, the home of the yacht's owner, a
wealthy society lady who supports Dodd.
As Freddie accompanies Dodd on his travels promoting and developing The Cause, the two men
strike up a unique relationship that, at first, Dodd's fiercely protective wife, Peggy (Amy
Adams), finds encouraging. After their first meeting, she tells Freddie that he's inspired Dodd,
but before long she's become distrustful of Freddie's drinking, for which her husband shares a
taste, and of his sexual proclivities, which Peggy somehow seems to sense and, with the unerring
instinct of a long-time spouse, identifies in her husband as well. In one of the film's many surreal
sequences, Freddie watches Dodd sing to a group of his followers, and in Freddie's imagination,
every woman in the group becomes a sex object (I'm being deliberately vague for those who
have not yet seen the film). But in the next scene, Peggy punishes
Dodd for Freddie's thoughts,
as if she knew exactly what was in his mind and blamed her husband for sharing it (or perhaps
inciting it).
Even though
The Master depicts much of Dodd's home-baked philosophy and contains many
scenes of his treatment method known as "processing", the film isn't really about The Cause
(which Anderson avowedly modeled on Scientology). Nor is it about Freddie's voyage of self-discovery, because Freddie has no desire to know
himself. Rather,
the film is about the mysterious, charged connection between these two men that neither of them
can quite explain, but that keeps yanking them back into each other's orbit. Throughout the film,
Dodd repeatedly tells Freddie he's sure they've met. At first, it seems like a harmless trick to
establish rapport, but when Dodd eventually "remembers" their meeting, you're not sure what to
make of it. By then, there have been so many cues—thematic, verbal, visual—establishing Freddie and
Dodd as kindred spirits that they could almost be aspects of the same person.
When they first meet, Freddie asks Dodd what he
does, but Dodd answers a different question.
He says what he
is. After listing a number of occupations, he says: "But above all, I am a man, a
hopelessly inquisitive man.
Just like you." Even if one treats this as merely a con man's patter,
their positions are almost immediately reversed, when Dodd reveals his affinity for Freddie's
home brew and asks what's in it. "Secrets", says Freddie, with a grin, perhaps sensing that no
other answer is better calculated to intrigue Dodd. Now it's Freddie who's conning Dodd, since
his rot gut is nothing more than a mixture of whatever whiskeys are available, plus paint thinner.
Dodd wants more, and Freddie is only too happy to oblige, because it guarantees him food and
lodging. Who's conning whom?
And so things go, as Freddie moves in Dodd's world but retains his outsider's perspective. He
does Dodd's exercises, but takes them no more seriously than the VA's Rorshack tests. At some
level, he knows, like Dodd's son, Val (Jesse Plemons), that Dodd is making it up as he goes
along, but he doesn't care. When Dodd is criticized by a skeptic, John More (Christopher Evan
Welch), or his latest book is dismissed as nonsense by his publisher (Kevin Anderson), or Dodd
is arrested on a warrant sworn out by a wealthy contributor who has had second thoughts, Freddie
leaps to his defense, violently so. Freddie may be skeptical of Dodd, but he won't tolerate
disloyalty in anyone else. Nothing angers him quicker.
In this, too, he is matched by Dodd, whose temper is equally intense, though somewhat better
controlled, when he is challenged by anyone—including Freddie. In a remarkable scene midway
through the film, the two men are placed in adjoining jail cells, Dodd on the warrant and Freddie
for interfering with the police. Freddie arrives already at gale force from battling the officers who
subdued him, and it takes Dodd a while to rev up to his level. But Freddie keeps provoking him,
and eventually the two men are standing on opposite sides of their prison bars, face to face,
yelling at each other at full volume. What has become of The Cause now?
Anderson has always been deliberate in his choices of words, and it can't be an accident that he
gave Dodd's organization an ambiguous name that can refer to a movement or a crusade but also
to a basis, source or origin. Dodd's processing is intended to identify the "cause" of people's
present-day problems in past experiences and "free" them from the hold of the past. More than
anyone else, it is Freddie who challenges Dodd's method by stubbornly refusing to be molded by
Dodd's processing. Even after he has revisited his past traumas, Freddie remains who and what
he is, which is no doubt why Dodd finds it so hard to let Freddie go. Though they are separated at
the end of the film (obviously at Peggy's insistence), can one really be certain that the separation
is permanent? Freddie once walked away from Dodd, and all it took was a phone call to bring
them back together. Who can say when circumstances may once again cause the negative and the
positive to collide (to borrow one of Dodd's facile phrases)?
The Master Blu-ray, Video Quality
As has been widely publicized,
The Master was the first fiction film to be shot in 65mm since
Kenneth Branagh's
Hamlet in 1996 (although hand-held sequences, about
15% of
the film, were
shot in 35mm). The DP was Mihai Malaimare Jr., the Romanian cinematographer best known for
shooting
Tetro and
Youth Without Youth for Francis Coppola. (Anderson's usual collaborator,
Robert Elswit, was unavailable due to other commitments.) Unlike most contemporary releases,
post-production work was completed photochemically, without the use of a digital intermediate.
The existing Blu-ray format may not have sufficient resolution to convey the full image detail of
a 65mm negative. (DP Malaimare estimates that 8K resolution would be required.) Nevertheless,
the image on Anchor Bay's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is nothing short of stunning, with
density, detail, sharpness and sheer
presence against which any Blu-ray I have seen to date can
favorably compare. Colors range from the cool (
intensely cool) blues of the Pacific locales where
Freddie Quell serves as a sailor to the warm and just-too-saturated palette of the New York party
where Dodd is the guest of honor and the Philadelphia home where he takes up residence. The
film's visual design, and indeed the inspiration to use large-format photography, had its
inspiration in portrait photography (one of Freddie's many jobs), and scene after scene harkens
back to this initial concept, with the camera locked down for an extended take, allowing the
viewer to soak up the detail within the frame and be drawn into the scene.
If you look very closely, you can discern the film's grain pattern, but the photography is so sharp
and the post-processing has been so carefully monitored that the grain is almost imperceptible.
Certainly, having taken so much trouble to get the image just right prior to release, the
filmmakers have been careful not to allow any digital tampering for the Blu-ray, and the
compressionist did not add to their challenges.
