Under the Spell of “The Master”

It took a few days for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master to sink in.

Seldom have I been so bewildered and enchanted by a film and not instantly grasped why it should have such an effect on me. I have seen several other Oscar-nominated films since, but the ingredients that make up The Master – the rolling blue waves, the obscene sand sculpture, the anguish in the eyes of Freddie Quell (an otherworldly Joaquin Phoenix), the madcap motorbike race through the desert, the probing psychological sessions with the Master (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Amy Adams’ cryptic, mildly sinister character – have not lost their hypnotic effect one tiny bit.

The film’s length and halting pace help. You are immersed in the tormented world of a war veteran who has long learnt to numb his pain with alcohol and drifts in and out of reality. When Quell comes under the tutelage of the Master, we are both relieved and worried for him. He may be out of the storm, but what tempest has he got himself into? The Master is a questionable figure propagating quasi-religious/philosophical ideas about transmigration and predestination. There are detractors (his own son being one of them), but there is little doubt he has staunch followers whose lives have been altered by his system of belief. Quell falls somewhere in between. He is grateful to have been saved (he is fiercely protective of the Master), but at the same time he is unsure what the Master’s rhetorics would really do for him. This doubt remains, and is one of the main factors that contributes to the film’s gripping ambiguity.

When the two part ways, there is a sense of inevitability. Quell is a man with no ties, and it is no surprise that he should desire an existence beyond the influence of the Master. But they do meet again. In a peculiarly moving scene where the Master makes a final attempt to make Quell stay, the viewer, as if emerging from a hazy daydream, suddenly realises that the ties between the two men are unbreachable. There is that vague metaphysical possibility that they may have known each other in previous lifetimes, and after this day, even if Quell is to depart, will continue to move forward with an invisible bond between them.

Director Anderson does not do clarity. He hints and suggests, through heady, nostalgic imagery. The viewer is left to question, long after the lights have come back on, if there is indeed such a thing as everlasting kinship and preordained destiny, and if certain lost souls are meant to meet again and again, providing each other succour in this mystical, limitless universe.

Definitely my film of the year – purely because it is the stuff that dreams are made of.

The Master (2012)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams