It\u2019s Oscar time once more. Seth MacFarlane has revealed the shortlist and once again it is my mission to watch all the Best Picture nominees \u2013 which in a way is disappointing as there are quite a few films coming out in the next few weeks which I am keen to see and which the Academy has not so blessed.<\/p>\n
One of these was The Master<\/i> which I watched over the weekend, which certainly has not gone unnoticed by AMPAS but which failed to get a Best Picture nomination. It is up for three acting awards however, and that\u2019s pretty fair as this is an actors\u2019 movie in every sense.<\/p>\n
The story, such as it is, concerns Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), an ex-Navy man finding it increasingly hard to adjust to civilian life and who falls under the influence of charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Both are nominated for acting awards and both fully deserve it \u2013 Phoenix seemingly in constant discomfort, his body bent and buckled under the weight of his frustration and confusion, dealing with his angst by imbibing paint-thinner or by finding things to hit. Hoffman is outstanding, grinning fatly behind a blond walrus moustache and genially attempting to crack open the psyches of his devout group of followers, through a technique which is part Freudian fantasising and part Meisner (the acting technique famed for its use of repetition).<\/p>\n
Early on, the narrative is lean and sleek, cutting years at a time to propel Freddie into Dodd\u2019s clutches, and throughout the camerawork is poised and careful, capturing the performances whole rather than creating them or amplifying them via cutting or framing. Amy Adams (also nominated) does well with very thin material and it\u2019s nice to see Laura Dern, although she is criminally underused.<\/p>\n
In the middle section, the details of Dodd\u2019s environment and Freddie\u2019s position within it are sufficient to sustain the interest, bar an ill-judged scene in which A Sceptical Onlooker confronts Dodd with The Voice Of Reason and gets a tomato thrown at him by Quell for his troubles. This scene didn\u2019t work for me, not because it was didactic (although it was) but because it stopped me seeing Dodd through Quell\u2019s eyes, and made his continuing support of Dodd more pitiable than relatable.<\/p>\n
Like Dodd\u2019s own bizarre crusade, the film itself fatally runs out of steam in the final third. The story design demands that Quell and Dodd continue to come into conflict, but Quell can\u2019t be allowed to heal since that would imply that the cult healed him, which clearly would be unacceptable to writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (and probably me too). But if Quell becomes his own man and abandons Dodd then that also seems to give the cult too much credit, and so the two men are shackled together \u2013 Dodd obsessing over Quell on the flimsiest of pretexts \u2013 until suddenly they aren\u2019t any more because it\u2019s time for the film to end.<\/p>\n
A very negative reading of the film is possible. From what we see of Dodd\u2019s techniques, it seems that by confronting the subject with endless pointless tasks, often the same task over and over again, eventually the subject, rather than the cult, is forced to provide an epiphany to fill the void \u2013 and the same could be said of this story: if we watch these two people locked together in enough demented activities, eventually we will be forced to imbue the proceedings with meaning. I\u2019m not quite ready to level that charge, but Anderson asks a lot of his audience when his story has so little in the way of a climax.<\/p>\n