Skip to main content

The Master


After watching The Master the other night, I very much wish it had been Paul Thomas Anderson and not Stephen Spielberg who had taken on Lincoln.  Anderson is able to create a "profound sense of ambiguity" in his films that Spielberg is simply incapable of doing.

This is Anderson's second film where he explores the American past.  In There Will Be Blood, he re-imagined Upton Sinclair's political novel, Oil.  He essentially created a parable out of the novel, and in The Master he does the same, this time drawing on a wide variety of sources in creating Lancaster Dodd and his protegee Freddie Quell.  To me, it was a more elegant rendering of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.  Freddie reminded me a lot of Hazel Motes in his rawness, if not religious conviction.

Lancaster Dodd doesn't really fit the image of Asa Hawks or Hoover Shoates.  Many reviewers have compared him to L. Ron Hubbard, who founded Scientology, especially with his interest in science fiction, an allegorical telling of his quasi-religious convictions that man is wholly separate from animals and his soul free to migrate from one time to another, or from one dimension to another.  But, Anderson is smart not to delve too deep in this regard, letting viewers make whatever connections they so choose.

Dodd's wife, Peggy, turns out not to be the wallflower she first appears as, but in many ways controlling her husband as the woman behind the throne.  Anderson captures an eeriness (especially in the music) to this family traveling cult, which calls itself simply "The Cause," but he casts no judgement upon them, letting the story play out to its ambiguous ending.


Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who has come into his own and displays a masterful control of his films. Of course, it helps when you have actors like Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will be Blood) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Master) but it is clearly Anderson who is in control, leading the audience along by the compelling force of these films.  Lincoln would have been an ideal figure for him to explore, especially in his relation to his wife, Mary Todd.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!