“The Master:” Seafaring Messiah and Broken Vet

David Begelman

Film Critic

Don’t feign surprise when someone tells you that Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film “The Master” is a riff on Scientology. The movie, about a cult leader, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and a World War II veteran swept up in his zany world, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), bears too many similarities to L. Ron Hubbard’s brain child to prevent us from drawing parallels.

Scientology makes for headline news in the media these days, primarily because of the split between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. And in the film Freddie encounters Lancaster, a guru peddling a consciousness-raising system called “The Cause,” by jumping aboard a yacht. The ship is only too reminiscent of the original flagship of Hubbard, the “Royal Scotsman” (later renamed “Apollo”) of Sea Org fame.

Lancaster Dodd’s convictions also include a belief in reincarnation, a staple of Scientology, as well as such a mixed bag as the Hindu faith, philosophers Protagoras and Nietzsche and Shirley MacLaine. And Dodd’s conflicts with the law in Anderson’s 70 mm film have him winding up in jail for financial irregularities. Hubbard’s career was similarly peppered with legal problems, including getting kicked out of countries like Morocco, Greece, Spain and England. These were euphemistically dubbed “disconnection cruises” by Ron on transoceanic trips in his flagship Apollo.

In “The Master,” Freddie is a veteran of war in the Pacific. It left him a person of turbulent emotion, violent mood swings and impending violence. He is also a raging alcoholic given to frequent drinking binges. In the eyes of Lancaster Dodd, Freddie becomes a test case for the power of The Cause. The guru first attempts to meet Freddie on the latter’s own terms. He quaffs a toxic brew concocted by Freddie to show his new acolyte he can mix it up with the best of the guzzlers.

Anderson’s film is expertly directed, with some dazzling cinematography. But its chief attraction is the riveting portrayals of its two leads. Hoffman turns in a charismatic performance as Lancaster Dodd. Is this star even capable of mediocre acting?

But the real surprise is Phoenix, whose very name is apposite for an actor risen from the ashes of several past second-rate scripts, not to mention a brief and useless stint as a rap singer. In “The Master,” Phoenix’s portrayal is the most accomplished one of his film career—even if his sagging shoulders and disjointed ambulation in the role are a bit over the top for his character.

Mention should also be made of Amy Adams’ portrayal as “Peggy,” Lancaster Dodd’s wife. The actress radiates a steely reserve, marking the resoluteness of her commitment to her husband’s philosophy. She maintains an unflinching dedication to The Cause even when Dodd loses his cool. On one occasion, he suddenly erupts in anger when questioned by a follower, Helen Sullivan (Laura Dern) about a change of doctrine. His revisionism calls for replacing the memory of true events with the creative play of imagination.

The change, once commemorating a similar modification in L. Ron Hubbard’s system of Dianetics—not to mention Freud’s psychoanalysis—was broached by an early Scientologist, Dr. Joseph Winter. He speculated that aspects of “prenatal engrams” might have been “imagined” rather than being “true memories.” Of course, once you entertain the possibility that fantasy might replace what you once deemed to be reality, the collapse of your conceptual house of cards is just around the corner. There’s nothing like getting real to tarnish a theory’s fondest aspirations.

The subtext of “The Master” is Dodd’s faith in the spiritual rehabilitation of Freddie under his tutelage. But Freddie’s wayward path through alcoholism and his sex-obsessed interactions with women clash with the devotional path charted by The Cause. Yet from another angle, these frailties might be considered advantages. After all, they are stumbling blocks to a “religious” conversion that is only another form of slavery in disguise. Or is there something else percolating in Freddie that resists Dodd’s version of the true calling? 

At the end of the film, Dodd forewarns Freddie that the next time they meet, he will show no mercy. It’s an expected apostrophe for a leader whose world view demands nothing less than a mind-set confusing purity with mindlessness.       

 

 

 

        

 

Film Review: Charlie Kaufman’s  Synecdoche, New York

 

David Begelman

 

Sometimes it’s better not to heed film critics—including yours truly. If you do, you could wind up puzzling over why they rave about a movie whose alleged virtues escape you. Maybe it’s wiser just to go with your gut feeling before the highbrows convince you you’ve missed something that moviemakers—Charlie Kaufman among them—have delivered. A majority of them, but by no means all, feel the director has crafted a masterpiece in Synecdoche, New York, his directorial debut. For what it’s worth, I think otherwise.

Kaufman at least deserves credit for mounting a project with an important aim. But you need more than grandiose ambition to produce quality. Far from being original, Synecdoche, New York capitalizes on a theme that is distinctively European anyway: blurring the difference between performer and role. The conceit was developed more effectively in film by Frederico Fellini in his 8 ½, and in drama by Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Mr. Kaufman’s cinematic exercise, despite its worthy intentions, is simply too long, too awkward, and too convoluted to hold up. It hardly deserves a place alongside those other venerable works.

The hero of the film, Caden Cotard (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), is an aspiring auteur who grumbles about his health throughout the length of the movie. One might say he virtually schleps his way through physical complaints. Well, we get the point about his health concerns; but does Kaufman have to beat a dead horse relentlessly, with no end in sight? The very air around Caden seems suffused with ailments that won’t let up. At the outset of the film, his daughter worries about her green poop, a magazine reads, “attending to your illness,” Harold Pinter just passed away, avian flu was discovered in a turkey, and someone dies at the University of Alabama. Just in case you think illness is restricted to organisms, Caden’s pipes burst and flood a bathroom. Even Caden’s psychotherapist (Hope Davis) is named Madeleine Gravis (as in the autoimmune disease, Myasthenia Gravis?).   

The same sad news seems to infect Caden’s disordered relationships with women, be they his departed wife Adele (Catherine Keener), or dalliances with others like Claire (Michelle Williams), Hazel (Samantha Morton), and Tammy (Emily Watson).

Director Kaufman is, if nothing else, a word game enthusiast. Cotard’s Syndrome, an actual diagnosis, happens to be a severe delusional disorder about being dead, non-existent, or without internal organs. But Caden Cotard’s problem is quite different. It is only hypochondriasis, or a Body Dysmorphic Disorder reinforced by actual dental problems, disorders of the urinary tract, eyes, bones, skin, and mastication. In a section of the film he convulses; in another, he has his head stitched up.  

Caden hails from Schenectady, New York, almost a homonym of the film’s title, while a name on an address directory in the film is “Capgras.” The Capgras Syndrome, another psychiatric—although in all likelihood, neurological—blight is a disorder in which familiar persons are unrecognizable, or seen as “imposters.” So Kaufman, who also wrote the screenplay, supplies suggestive hints about his downbeat hero that exaggerate the reality of his actual condition.

Caden is a director who initially stages a modest production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in his home town, Schenectady. Why he should receive a bountiful MacArthur Foundation grant is anybody’s guess. He goes on to use the award to direct a humongous vehicle, the story of his own life, in a warehouse that occupies a sizable section of lower Manhattan. It seems the MacArthur Foundation folks have gone overboard when it comes to theater subsidy, much the way Charlie Kaufman goes overboard in his unwieldy venture. Like his hero, Kaufman wants to explore “the essence of each being.” Except, it may be conjectured, all over the place.

In Synecdoche, New York, everyone has an incessant pattern. When characters are sad, they are inveterately so; when they recall their misbegotten pasts or longings, they do so remorselessly. The durability of their discontent is the film’s invisible (and irritating) mantra.

As for the theater Caden constructs for the reenactment of his life story, don’t get me started. “Big” is too simplistic a word for the edifice. Even the actor who plays Caden in the movie within the movie, Tom Noonan, is a towering performer who was the original tooth fairy in Manhunter. And if only to drum home the idea of bigness by way of contrast with the miniscule, Caden’s wife Adele is an artist who creates paintings so small, they have to be seen through magnifying glasses! 

Synecdoche, New York takes place over the course of 50 years, while we watch its hero age progressively. The improvised scenes he directs in his magnum opus are a bewildering assortment of vignettes. In them, confusion reigns so supreme, you can’t make head or tail out of the “brutal truth” of characters awash in versions of a slippery reality. Caden’s peroration about the last day of filming, the day he announces he will die, is cut from the same morose cloth. As if to pour salt on wounded sentiment, he adds: “And that day will be the longest day of my life.”

After Synecdoche, New York, I’m for cheering things up with a good old slasher film. The quick demise might be just what the doctor ordered after all the fuss.