My Log 338 Jan 21 2013: The Master, a strange, hard-to-understand portrait of a cult leader and his follower

Cover of Joaquin Phoenix

 

 I bow to no one in my admiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s marvellous film, There Will Be Blood in which Daniel Day Lewis gave one of his astounding portrayals, that time of a predatory, ruthless pioneer of the American oil industry.

That movie was based on the first few chapters of a book by radical novelist Upton Sinclair, and it was such a riveting movie that, even when I later happened upon it two or three times on TV, my interest on each occasion was immediately caught by whatever scene happened to come up, and I was unable to drag myself away until the end.

I am unhappy to have to report that I cannot work up a comparable enthusiasm for the same director’s new movie, The Master, which has been said to have been loosely based on the life of L. Ron Hubbard in creating the cult of Scientology.  Far from being an account of Hubbard’s life, even loosely translated, this movie is actually an account of the relationship between a war-affected ex-serviceman, an unstable drifter with a tendency towards violence, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and the man who became his Master, played by the amazing actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Just what accounted for the closeness of this relationship is never adequately explained to the audience, nor is the basis of their friendship. 

A batch of reviews handed out by the Cinema du Parc, where I saw the movie, suggests that critics have been united in only one thing, which is their puzzlement over the meaning of the movie.  Te method of telling the story is so disparate, so disjointed, that it was  difficult to follow what was actually happening.

For myself, I thought I was watching a rather too sympathetic accunt of the life of an unscrupulous cult leader, of whom his son said, at one point, “he is making it up as he goes along. Can’t you see that?” But my friend with whom I saw the movie saw it as an account of a love affair between the Master, leader of the cult, and this violent, attractive drifter. That never occurred to me, to tell the truth, but I cannot dismiss it as completely unreasonable.

What does puzzle me is the opinion expressed by a good number of the leading film critics in the United States (and elsewhere) that the movie was so puzzling that probably in the future it will emerge as a masterpiece. /several of them had already seen the movie two, and even three times.

Although how they could have borne sitting through it ---- two hours and twenty minutes of it --- three times leaves me almost as baffled as what the move was about .

My Log 338 Jan 21 2013

The Master, a strange, hard-to-understand portrait of a cult leader and his follower

I bow to no one in my admiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s marvellous film, There Will Be Blood in which Daniel Day Lewis gave one of his astounding portrayals, that time of a predatory, ruthless pioneer of the American oil industry.

That movie was based on the first few chapters of a book by radical novelist Upton Sinclair, and it was such a riveting movie that, even when I later happened upon it two or three times on TV, my interest on each occasion was immediately caught by whatever scene happened to come up, and I was unable to drag myself away until the end.

I am unhappy to have to report that I cannot work up a comparable enthusiasm for the same director’s new movie, The Master, which has been said to have been loosely based on the life of L. Ron Hubbard in creating the cult of Scientology.  Far from being an account of Hubbard’s life, even loosely translated, this movie is actually an account of the relationship between a war-affected ex-serviceman, an unstable drifter with a tendency towards violence, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and the man who became his Master, played by the amazing actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Just what accounted for the closeness of this relationship is never adequately explained to the audience, nor is the basis of their friendship. 

A batch of reviews handed out by the Cinema du Parc, where I saw the movie, suggests that critics have been united in only one thing, which is their puzzlement over the meaning of the movie.  Te method of telling the story is so disparate, so disjointed, that it was  difficult to follow what was actually happening.

For myself, I thought I was watching a rather too sympathetic accunt of the life of an unscrupulous cult leader, of whom his son said, at one point, “he is making it up as he goes along. Can’t you see that?” But my friend with whom I saw the movie saw it as an account of a love affair between the Master, leader of the cult, and this violent, attractive drifter. That never occurred to me, to tell the truth, but I cannot dismiss it as completely unreasonable.

What does puzzle me is the opinion expressed by a good number of the leading film critics in the United States (and elsewhere) that the movie was so puzzling that probably in the future it will emerge as a masterpiece. /several of them had already seen the movie two, and even three times.

Although how they could have borne sitting through it ---- two hours and twenty minutes of it --- three times leaves me almost as baffled as what the move was about .