Film Carew

A friend of mine once told me that he could never trust a man wearing pleated pants. That, like Ned Flanders' moustache, all that gathered fabric made it seem like he, the man wearing pleated pants, had something to hide. In The Master, Joaquin Phoenix plays a limping, gimpy, stumbling drunk who wears his trousers pulled up to here, and often those high-hitched pants boast pleats. The most non-contemporary cut of his period tailoring feels like just so much fabric, too much, accordion-folds squeezing and pulling like they're harbouring something in there, in all that billowing extraneousness. In one of the film's moments of raw drama – the kind of public humiliation that filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson has long sent his characters suffering through –  one trouser leg of Phoenix's comes torn asunder. This is, of course, symbolic; a man verily splitting at the seams, fraying wildly, tearing apart. But what's most eye-catching – in an eye-catchingly flat, sustained shot of twin prison cells, where frames within frames within frames create men divided from each other, then divided within themselves – is just how much fabric there is, just how far Phoenix's trousers flare out when torn. A man with pants that large, with oh so many pleats, surely has something to hide.

The Master, effectively, is about coming to discover what Phoenix is hiding. Anderson uses that familiar cinematic gambit of the new millennium, where filmmaking is a form of collective narrative psychotherapy, and we sit with damaged humans, hear their stories, inching closer to that revelatory moment in which they 'open up' to the source of their trauma, disclose their painful secret, or confess to past sins. Phoenix's character clearly has something to hide; not just in his pants, or his hobbled gate, or his habitual drunkenness; but in the way he literally talks out of the side of his mouth, the actor's scarred, split lip never seeming more perfectly placed on his handsome face. And, hand in hand with his secrecy goes shame; and the shame comes from male pride; and now we're in ever-more therapeutic territory; with this whole narrative being gently coaxed from our lead by Philip Seymour Hoffman's titular Master, the leader of a mid-20th-century spiritualist movement, The Cause, that is decidedly cult-like.

This Master, too, has hidden secrets; Anderson even having him, in a very large piece of symbolism, bury past writings – that serve as foundation for his movement – in a box in the desert. Hoffman plays him with a sense of high-theatrical flourish; a piece of meta-acting creating insincerity at work; this master ruling not through outright tyranny and intimidation, but through wit and humour, through laughter and love, through the force of his personality. He's an orator forever on stage, forever pleased with himself; cheeks red with the glow of destiny made manifest. Through the defiant self-actualisation and ego-manifestation, this Master has made himself a prophet of his own word; both Moses coming down from the mountain and God intoning his own commandments. Yet the joviality of his manner – and the 'comic opera' of his mission – makes the veracity of the Master's beliefs seem suspect; though he doesn't tolerate dissent of any kind, most of his inner-circle get the fact that he's just making this shit up as he goes along.

The Cause lures its followers with these projections of the future, of their own abilities to make manifest their own dreams; to follow in the footsteps of the Master as they follow him devotedly. There's a telling scene in which Amy Adams – playing Hoffman's wife as the colder, more calculating, more manipulative Queen to the bon vivant King – tries to convince Phoenix's character to “stop the boozing” (there's a deft dash of period vernacular here, but nothing where it becomes a quirk or draws attention to itself). She does so by having him think of something, then claims to have placed it in the future for him to collect. This is, of course, the carrot of religion converted into tiny, yet tellingly-consequential dramatic device. What Phoenix dreams of attaining – where it's winning back his first love (Madisen Beaty) or nailing the Master's daughter (Ambyr Childers) – is never revealed; nor is this moment revisited again. But shaping the future, guiding one's own destiny, lingers there throughout; even though the film is – both within its own narrative structure, and with the dramatic depiction of the The Cause's evaluation 'processing' – obsessed with the past. The film's main recurring visual motif is of the wake left behind ships; be they naval vessels or party barges. This turbulent trail of choppy waters, stirring up whites and pale blues amidst the ocean's vast navy, symbolises the past; how wherever we've been is visible and tangible, and no matter the rate of knots we go, nor how far we travel, the past forever trails out behind us.

Yet, the scenes of processing have unending cinematic power. As much as it's great to marvel at Anderson's increasing command of composition – the way an overhead shot of naval vessel is matched to an overhead shot of a spiral staircase; the way a face is matched to a face; the way ultra-shallow focus is pulled back-and-forth from foreground to background, to highlight isolation and disjunction – the film is at its best when it's close-up on face: when it stares into the eyes of its characters, as if to peer into their souls (a scene in which Adams' eye changes colour as she stares into camera, this either Phoenix's perspective or the magic of The Cause brought to life, is beautifully underplayed, something that has rarely been PTA's strong suit). Processing is a mixture of psychotherapy, indoctrination, cod-mysticism, and straight-up hazing; Anderson interested in those twin messages – and effective internal conflicts – that exist within not just cults, but religions, and societies: the desire for complete discovery of the self via the complete submission of it. The probing questions are, of course, the needlework of pride, and secrets, and shame; at one point Phoenix is harassed, in an exercise, by the Master's son-in-law (Rami Malek), with the repeated motif of his accusations revolving around stupidity, and the shaming qualities thereof. The accusations carry truth: our lead character is no bright wit; the mentor/protégé victimiser/victim relationship at core echoing that of There Will Be Blood, where a charismatic, visionary, monstrous mobiliser-of-men takes a damaged, beaten, toadying wretch under his arm, in an embrace both fatherly and filicidal. Oncemore, the younger charge fails to rise to the dreams of the elder; here, Phoenix is just, really, a self-destructive drunk obsessed with pussy. Anderson makes the connection between the spiritual and the carnal plainly obvious; and, thus, this is where the film ends, with our fallen anti-hero relieving his indoctrination, half-comically, in bed with a shapely lass, concerned only with the whereabouts of his cock.

The Master is, for all its mastery, likely to displease many. Not just the mouthbreathers who need explosions and/or will see its deliberate, eerily empty tone as being an affront to their need for 'something' to happen, but for those who wanted the man who unleashed Daniel Day Lewis's most lacerating performance to turn that same venom to what became, through simple shorthand; Anderson's 'scientology movie'. There's no satire, here, and there's very little outright critique; for as much as the whole movement seems a sham, there is no sense to make Hoffman's character a villain; and the picture bids adieu to The Cause with Phoenix stumbling and lost, Hoffman and Adams composed and together, together. The film that scientology haters desire already exists, in many ways, though: Sean Durkin's unsettling debut Martha Marcy May Marlene. There, its cult is into petty crime and casual killing; and the perfectly-sustained paranoia-thriller mood leaves off with one of the best-judged endings in recent cinema; where it doesn't matter if the threat of the cult is real or not, just that the paranoia it creates is real; that to be made a prisoner-of-the-mind goes beyond simple incarceration. Durkin's picture found contemporary profundity through parable, but Anderson's feels less specific, less cultural, less political. And, in some ways, that does make The Master a lesser film; lesser than what we wanted, what it could have been, and what There Will Be Blood (in its vision of America as eternal frontier, forever raped of its plenty by oil men and zealots, both) was. Yet, even if it somehow feels lesser unto itself, The Master carries a feeling of 'more' when taken into contemporary context; given how superior it is to the vast majority of American cinema. That is faint praise, I know, but it's hard to offer out-and-out plaudits on a picture like this; The Master, essentially, a brilliantly-made film by a brilliant filmmaker that, even still, doesn't quite alight upon genuine greatness.