The good guys do not always win, but as often as not I am right about whom the good guys are—except when I’m dead wrong.
Over the past week, reconfirmation of this fact came with the revelation that Boston University professor Ray Carney had absconded with filmmaker Mark Rappaport’s digital video masters, a matter that has been playing out in public forums via open letters from both Mr. Rappaport and filmmaker Jon Jost. This news was widely received with shock, though I note that at least one perspicacious critic, in a 2006 review of Andrew Bujalski’s first feature, Funny Ha Ha, identified Mr. Carney as “a mountebank academic with aspirations of indie avatardom who dresses like an infomercial host and likes to remind his readers how darn serious he is about art by mentioning Bach or Henry James in every single paragraph he’s ever written.” (Though I failed to note this at the time, Carney is also positively addicted to using variations on the phrase “ju-jitsu the culture,” and is an enthusiastic rollerblader.)
As a bête noire is toppled, a favorite rises again. Karmic balance is restored as Kent Jones pulls a successful General MacArthur on the Film Society of Lincoln Center, replacing the outgoing Richard Peña at the New York Film Festival after a less-than-cheery departure from programming at FSLC, which was bemoaned here by yours truly.
The other event of note in the film world week that was: The release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth feature, The Master, a staunchly noncommercial $35M period piece realized through the good graces of 25-year-old heiress and auteur’s angel investor Megan Ellison, which I saw projected in 70mm this Wednesday at the Ziegfeld Theatre.
Quite coincidentally, I wrote about movie drunks last week, and The Master contains a doozy of one—Freddie Quell, played by Joaquin Phoenix, giving his first performance in what can be properly called a fiction film since 2008’s Two Lovers. When first encountered, Quell is drawing pay from the Navy, marking time on some Pacific isle at the fag-end of WWII, spending The Best Years of His Life getting high on torpedo fuel and humping a woman made of sand. This overture precedes the catastrophe that results when Quell, who can’t manage to stuff his id back into the bottle, is unleashed on the stateside civilian population.
In last week’s column, I dwelt on James Dean’s Jett Rink in George Stevens’ 1956 Giant, and I do not think it is heresy to mention Phoenix’s performance in the same breath. In fact, one almost has to, for the legacy of method acting is absolutely central to Anderson’s film, which largely takes place in 1950, when this revolution in American acting was well underway, and which hinges on a number of visualization exercises that one can easily imagine taking place under the direction of Stella Adler or Lee Strasberg. If Phoenix’s Freddie Quell doesn’t specifically bring Dean to mind, it is only because Phoenix seems so entirely to have summoned the spirit of Dean’s spiritual big brother, Montgomery Clift—it’s in the bristling, vexed black brows, the concave chest and jagged elbows from akimbo arms, even in Phoenix’s harelip-ish scar and half-snarl, suggesting the damaged, post-auto-accident Clift, not the beautiful young man who suffered so vividly in A Place in the Sun (1951) under the direction of none other than George Stevens.
I have long been fond of a quote attributed to Clift—“The sadness of our existence should not leave us blunted, on the contrary: how to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable and stay alive?”—and the vulnerable Phoenix gives the impression of being the rare working movie actor who may have actually given this plight some thought. Phoenix’s very public troubles began in Puerto Rico, 1974, where he was born to two soon-to-defect missionaries in the young Children of God cult, which has over the years gained something of a reputation for pederasty. This bit of biography can only have been regarded as an additional qualification by Anderson, for The Master, as practically everyone knows, is concerned with a cultish religious movement in its coltish, persecuted, apostolic early years, and specifically with an L. Ron Hubbard-like figure, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who promotes a Scientology-like faith called “The Cause,” through a Dianetics-like book called The Cause.
A brief survey of Anderson’s filmography turns up a few self-styled prophets and confidence men: There is Paul Dano’s Eli Sunday, scamming funding for his Church of the Third Revelation in There Will Be Blood (shot in Marfa, Texas, forty years after Stevens’ Giant had left town), and seduction seminar guru Frank T.J. Mackie in 1999’s Magnolia, played by Mr. Tom Cruise, the most public face of Scientology. Another connection, which has been touched on elsewhere, is the 2007 suicides of Jeremy Blake and his girlfriend Theresa Duncan, who had prior to their deaths alleged persecution by shadowy Scientologist forces.
Blake was the digital artist who created interstitial imagery for Anderson’s 2002 Punch-Drunk Love—a film that, like The Master’s burlesqued version of the classical wild child-mentor tale, might be said to be “about” self-regulation. It is an attribute Freddie is entirely free of. Chased out of even the lowliest of civilian jobs, Freddie has brought some undisclosed trauma back from the Pacific front—his longing for a jilted girlfriend back home in Massachusetts, allegedly the root of his alcoholism, may as much be a longing for the very idea of home than for the specific girl—and is quite probably brain-damaged from the potent homebrew he has been drinking as fast as he can whip it up out of household cleaners and developer fluid. (Phoenix has said that Anderson gifted him, as homework, John Huston’s 1946 film of the walking wounded, Let There Be Light, and Lionel Rogosin’s 1954 portrait of skid row Sterno drinkers, On the Bowery: two masterworks of mid-century masculine trauma.)
Out-to-sea in the officially-affirmative postwar America, unmoored Freddie blows into Dodd’s hands when he drunkenly wanders onto the yacht that Dodd has chartered for a cruise to New York City, announcing himself as an able-bodied seaman. Freddie’s attraction to the panacea that Dodd is selling—his bread-and-butter is a program of suppression of the basal ganglia and animal impulse—seems clear. To extend the nautical metaphor, it’s any port in a storm. Dodd’s attraction seems equally obvious: To impose himself onto this barbarian would be the ultimate measure of his mastery. But the façade of entire composure that Dodd presents does not remain intact for long: Dodd’s cool breaks on having to confront a simple line of skeptical inquisition at a cocktail party, prompting him into a Tourette-like hiss of “Pig fuck.” When, a little further along on The Cause’s East Coast tour, Dodd and Freddie are hauled in by the Philadelphia Police and thrown into adjoining cells, it takes very little time for both to be reduced to Pavlov dogs, barking at one another through the grille that separates them until the Master, who’s earlier shown a smug forbearance at Freddy’s tendency to break wind for comic effect, gives way to animal need and turns away to take a piss.
Complicating matters is the third corner of the triangle—Dodd’s wife, Peggy, played by Amy Adams. Subsequent scenes will reveal Peggy as something like the brains behind Dodd’s throne: ghost-writer dictating what will be her husband’s sophomore work to him in a New York hotel room, later doling out a Kung-Fu grip handjob to her obeisant husband over the bathroom sink, as one might toss a pet a treat—well and truly taming the cock, to fiddle with Frank T.J. Mackie’s catchphrase. Armed with these insights into the Dodd marriage, Lancaster’s attachment to Freddie comes to seem like a vicarious-living fascination, the sort that the subdued so often harbor for the undomesticated. One thinks of Kerouac’s worship of uninhibited Neal Cassidy, for one cannot help but plug the period’s cultural reference points into The Master; as much as a method man, itinerant Freddie is a Beat poet and he don’t even know it.
If I’ve been clanging on the George Stevens connections, it is because I feel about The Master much as I feel about A Place in the Sun and Giant. As much as I admire Clift, Dean, and Phoenix in their roles, I cannot accept the movies they appear in at their own estimation. In a laudatory review of The Master, my colleague Adam Nayman puts the Case Against P.T. Anderson as well as any detractor, referring to the director’s “[using] big moments and big leaps to elide the grunt work of successful dramaturgy.” (The curse of being Canadian is to see both sides of every issue… Or is that supposed to be the Irish?)
As ever, I find Anderson something like the Rex Grossman of cinema, his entire game based on taking crazy downfield strikes—frog storms, Aimee Mann sing-alongs, donut shop and bowling alley bloodbaths or, this time around, Nudie-Cutie musical numbers and homoerotic lullabies—towering stand-alone moments to which I never seem to be able to summon the appropriate emotional response, startling and impressive but seeming to wobble dangerously the longer that one looks at them, detached as they are from any supportive undergirding. Scott Foundas, in a Village Voice profile of Anderson which further suggests that mine is a minority distaste among cinephiles, writes that “The Master is ultimately ‘about’ Scientology in much the same way that Boogie Nights was about the San Fernando Valley adult-film industry of the 1970s or There Will Be Blood was about the California oil boom of the early 20th century. That is, it functions as a secondary concern, more setting than actual subject, more subtext than text.” All of which is well and good, though I confess that I am the sort of prosaic person who might like to know more about the California oil boom of the early 20th century, or the practical administration of a cult confidence game. (Timothy Carey’s 1962 The World’s Greatest Sinner and Curtis Harrington’s 1971 What’s the Matter with Helen? remain unthreatened as the greatest films on American pseudo-religious faddism.)
Of course, I could be wrong, and I could be staring a masterpiece square in the face. And it puts Anderson in rare enough company to say that his movies demand to be stared at and scrutinized at all.