The Master of Nothing

My wife and I went to see The Master this past weekend.  The reasons were several.  First, Grantland had previewed a bunch of movies coming out before the end of the year and highlighted that Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and some others) wrote and directed it.  Second, Joaquin Phoenix was back properly acting instead of doing this.  Third, Philip Seymour Hoffman can carry a movie alone.  Fourth, we love Landmark E Street Cinemas and are trying to support it (and you can order liquor there — and not no paper cup — I’m talking a glass of Jack Daniels).  With all that being said, I was hesitant to take my wife because she can sometimes make snap judgments about movies.  For example, within 10 seconds of J Edgar starting, she leaned over and said, “I’m going to hate this movie.”  The stakes were even higher with my wife because she had picked The Perks of Being a Wallflower for us to see a couple of weeks ago, and it turned out to be the best movie I’ve seen in a while.  I knew The Master would be a slower pace.  I knew it was a risk.  And with the pressure on, Mr. Anderson, Mr. Phoenix, and Mr. Hoffman decided to take a shit on our Saturday night – like die on the toilet Elvis-style shit. 

The movie was about something, I think, but had no story arc.  Hoffman was The Master, basically starting a cult.  I read somewhere that it was about Scientology.  Here’s an idea – you could just come out say that you made a movie about the origins of Scientology.  I’m into that.  The unnecessary mysteriousness around something as basic as – this movie is about X – is ridiculous.  The pace was lethargic.  Amy Adams jerks Hoffman off while imploring him to stop boozing.  The booze in this case was homemade elixirs made my Phoenix that included paint thinner.  I’m being very negative, but I’m also not making any of this up.  I’ll try to talk about some of the positives.  Phoenix’s acting performance alone held my interest for about an hour.  He was gaunt, kept his shoulders shrugged, and the right side of his mouth always stayed a little bit more closed than the left side.  He genuinely seemed fucked up.  Hoffman sang monologues a cappella and delivered a nice performance.  A couple of memorable (and beautiful) scenes were when both men got arrested and have a heated confrontation in two jail cells side-by-side, and the scene when Hoffman takes Phoenix, his daughter, and son-in-law to the desert to ride motorcycles as fast as they can to an undetermined, but specific, point in the distance.  I sort of get it, but not really. 

Which brings me to my last point – I might be done with the overly artistic movie that is allegedly so smart that it is not obvious what it’s actually about.  I mean, I like to think.  I do it every day, and my job demands I think about *big* stuff all the time.   But now I’m THINKING that maybe I don’t want to see movies that make me work really hard to piece together some semblance of a story.  The Perks of Being a Wallflower was about being in high school.  I remember that, and can relate my own experiences to it:  easily and enjoyably.  (That’s why I love Superbad so much too).  Perks was a wonderful story about being a teenager, and wanting to be accepted.  I mean, even Drake knows about that (for best Drake verse ever, go to 2:05)  Maybe I buried the lead, but The Master was about a screwed up drunk who wandered onto a boat one night and was manipulated by an up-and-coming cult leader.  Is that interesting to me?  Not really.  Can I relate to this?  Nope.  Did I remember my best times at the beach of making sand-females and then finger-fucking them?  STILL NO PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON.  The most positive thoughts I could walk away with came from the acting of Phoenix and Hoffman.  The aforementioned jail scene was a powerful duet.  But that was an isolated experience.  I would have preferred to go watch those two act random scenes together in some sort of actor’s studio workshop.  Did I mention that The Master is 2.5 hours long?  HELP!!!  So damn you Paul Thomas Anderson, for putting a stench on our Saturday night — one that we couldn’t even comprehend.